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K A NT' SI
PHILOSOPHY I

By A. D. Lindsay, M.A., of
Balliol College, Oxford

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

THE PHILOSOPHY OF

IMMANUEL KANT

By A. D. LINDSAY, M.A.

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FOREWORD

There is a story that Schopenhauer used to begin his
lectures on Kant by saying : " Let no one tell you what
is contained in the Critique of Pure Reason." The
writer of this little book hopes that no one will imagine
that he has disregarded this warning. There are no
short-cuts to the understanding of a great philosopher,
and the only way to appreciate the greatness of a
philosophic system is to study the philosopher's own
writings. All that the writer of a book like this can
hope to do is to persuade others to undertake that
study by interesting them in the problems with which
it deals, and by offering a few suggestions which may
help to an understanding of it. I have said nothing
about the numerous other works which Kant wrote.
For the three Critiques contain his system, and the under-
standing of that is all-important.

CONTENTS

CEi?. 1*AG«

I. THE IDEA OF CEITICISM 9

n. kant's statement of the problem, syn-
thetic A PRIORI JUDGMENTS . . .23

m. kant's idealism, time and space . . 34
IV. THE categories and the principles of pure

UNDERSTANDING 50

V. THE ANTINOMIES AND CRITICISM OF THE PROOFS

OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD . . .63

vi. kant's moral theory 72

vn. the "critique of judgment" . . .81

BIBLIOGRAPHY ... ... 90

THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

CHAPTER I

THE IDEA OF CETTICTSM

" It is a difficult matter," says Heine, " to write the
life history of Immamiel Kant, for he had neither life
nor history. He lived a mechanically ordered, abstract,
old bachelor kind of existence in a quiet, retired alley
in Konigsberg, an old town in the north-east corner of
Germany." The times he lived in were stirring enough.
He was born in 1724, and died in 1804. He lived
through the Seven Years' War that first made Germany
a nation, he followed with sympathy the United States
War of Independence, he saw the French Revolution
and the beginning of the career of Napoleon. Yet in
all his long life he never moved out of the province in
which he was born, and nothing was allowed to interrupt
the steady course of his lecturing, studying, and writing.
" Getting up," continues Heine, " drinking coffee,
lecturing, eating, going for a walk, everything had its
fixed time ; and the neighbours knew that it must be
exactly half-past four when Immanuel Kant, in his
gray frock-coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand,
stepped from his door and walked towards the little
lime-tree avenue, which is called after him the Philo-
sopher's Walk." " Strange contrast," reflects Heine,

9

10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

M between the man's outward life and his destructive,
world-smashing thoughts." As the political history of
the eighteenth century came to an end when the French
Revolution spilled over the borders of France and drove
Napoleon up and down Europe, breaking up the old
political systems and inaugurating modern Europe, so
its opposing currents of thought were gathered together
in the mind of a weak-chested, half-invalid little man
in Konigsberg, and from their meeting a new era in
philosophy began.

There are some philosophers to whom truth seems to
come almost unsought, as an immediate authoritative
vision. Kant was not one of these. His greatest work,
the Critique of Pure Reason, was conceived when he was
forty -eight, and published in 1781, when he was fifty-
seven. It was the outcome of half a lifetime's patient
study and thought. Heine says of him : " He was the
perfect type of the small shopkeeper. Nature had
meant him to weigh coffee and sugar, but fate willed
that he should weigh other things and put a God on his
scales, and his weighing was exact." The sneer is
unjust, but there is something in the simile ; for Kant's
philosophy was a kind of taking stock, a survey of the
great movement of thought from the time when the
Renaissance and the Reformation made thought free,
an attempt to estimate the achievements of the new
sciences, to deal with their conflicting claims and ideals
and say what it all came to. In Kant modern science,
which began with Descartes and Galileo, first became
conscious of itself.

This taking stock Kant called Criticism. His great
books are all called Critiques — the Critique of Pure
Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Critique of

THE IDEA OF CRITICISM 11

Judgment. He called his philosophy the Critical Philo-
sophy or Critical Idealism. Essential to an under-
standing of Kant is an understanding of what he
meant by criticism, and why he opposes it to dog-
matism and scepticism ; for the necessity and possi-
bility of such a criticism was his great philosophical
disco very. We have called Kant's work a survey of
the achievements of the thought of his times, but it
was very much more than that, and has a much more
universal significance than could belong to any history
of the thought of one epoch. For these achievements
of thought, though great, were conflicting and partial.
They contrasted with failure and barrenness in other
directions, and they seemed to be due to different
methods. This success of thought in one direction and
its failure in another, and this uncertainty about the
true method of science, were problems which at once
presented themselves to an impartial observer, and
Kant held that they could be answered only by
taking stock of actual attainments, and by criticism
of the powers and range of human thought in
general.

The problem that presented itself to him will be
understood if we look for a moment at the history of
thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
One thing that Kant noted in it was the steady and
sure progress of physics. "With the experiments of
Galileo and Torricelli," he says in the preface to the
second edition of the first Critique, " a new fight flashed
on all students of nature." The continued success of
physics meant the successful application of mathematics
to the concrete world, and along with it a remarkable
development of mathematics itself. This sudden sue-

12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

cess inspired men to feel that they had discovered a
way of explaining the universe ; they contrasted the
fertility of their new methods with the barrenness of
scholastic speculation in morals and theology ; they
felt confident that all that was wanted to the attainment
of certain knowledge in all spheres of human interest
was the extension of these methods. If men would only
set to work the right way, they were sure that all diffi-
culties would be overcome ; and, by reflection upon
their own success, they hoped to explain what the right
way was.

Unfortunately this was not easy, for the advance from
pure mathematics to physics, from a study of the
nature of pure mathematical conceptions to an inquiry
into the laws of falling bodies, implied a change whose
nature was not clear to the men who had themselves
made the advance. A conflict arose between those who
thought more of the fact that knowledge, to be certain,
must be capable of mathematical expression, and those
who thought more of the basis of experiment and
observation on which the new sciences depended, who
remembered that these sciences began when Galileo,
instead of thinking in the abstract how bodies ought to
fall, dropped bodies of different weights from the top of
the leaning tower of Pisa and observed what actually
happened. Descartes was the great representative of
the first school. He began by insisting on the difference
between mathematical truth which could be, as he said,
clearly and distinctly conceived, and ordinary opinion
about things which was full of guesswork and ima-
gination. Scientific knowledge was possible, he thought,
only by apprehending the real or primary qualities of
things which were mathematical, in contradistinction
to their secondary qualities — their colour, smell, &c. —

THE IDEA OF CRITICISM 13

which were less real. Thence he came to think that the
real world was mathematical in nature, like a huge,
intricate geometrical figure. The* elements of mere
faet, in our present knowledge, its dependence on ob-
servation and experiment, he thought of as temporary
defects which the progress of science would remove.
What we ordinarily call perception, indeed, in the sense
of awareness of things in time and space, was described
by Descartes' successors as confused thinking. Our know-
ledge of the world would, it was hoped, become a vast
mathematical system, all the detail and complexity of
which would be rigorously deducible from a few central
truths.

This general way of thinking was called Rationalism.
Kant ordinarily calls it Dogmatism. It was attacked
by other scientists for its view of the nature of space
and time. Xo one who reflects at all can fail to dis-
tinguish a difference between the way in which we see
the truth of a geometrical proposition — that, e.g., the
three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles —
and the way in which we judge that such and such a
figure drawn on a board is a triangle, or make judg-
ments about the way in which things are actually
arranged in space or succeed in time. Judgments of
the latter kind involve words like " here " and " there,"
" now " and " then," words which are all a kind of
pointing. It seems impossible from considering the
nature of a triangle to deduce why any existing thing
should be called triangular, and all statements about the
position of things in space and time seem to be derived
not from a consideration of the general nature of space
and time, but from observation. Now the science
which had made perhaps the most striking progress in
the time we are speaking of, physical astronomy, in-

14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

volved any number of statements about the position
of bodies in space. The Rationalist school admitted
this, but held that that was due to the fact that science
was not sufficiently thought out. In time, they hoped,
all statements about position in space would disappear.
To think of things in spatial order was to think con-
fusedly. Newton, on the other hand, held that space
could not be explained away, that astronomy implied
an absolute space in which things existed, that the
spatial relations of things could not be explained by
the nature of the things themselves, but only by a
reference to absolute space in which they all were.
This meant that observation or perception was some-
thing of which you could not hope and should not wish
to get rid, and that an ideal of knowledge in which all
applied mathematics should have been transmuted
into pure mathematics was a vain one. Astronomy
implied both mere observation and apprehension of
necessary relations. Here was a science which seemed
to employ both methods together. Galileo, in fact,
could not have made his discovery without observation,
but men had observed bodies falling for ages without
discovering the laws of motion. Further, the laws of
motion, once discovered, made men in some degree
independent of observation, made them able to say of
actual concrete things not only what had happened,
but what must happen.

Such difficulties as these arose from reflection on the
aims and methods of the mathematical sciences, but
there was much genuinely scientific inquiry in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which showed
no signs of taking mathematical form ; chemistry and
biology, for example, were still almost entirely empiri-

THE IDEA OF CRITICISM 15

cal. Furthermore, thinkers were not concerned with
science alone. These centuries saw a great revival of
interest in speculation on human affairs, history, politics,
morals and theology. England, which was the home of
free discussion on questions of politics and morals, and
where, more than in most other countries, there was free
discussion on theology, became also the home of empiri-
cism. The empirical movement, indeed, drew much
of its impetus from a reaction against Hobbes, the
only great English thinker who unhesitatingly applied
the mechanical and deterministic assumptions of the
new sciences to morals and politics, and arrived by this
uncompromising method at results so obviously repel-
lent that no man of any sense could accept them,
and so consistently presented that they could not
be refuted save by a refutation of the assumptions
upon which they were founded. Such a refutation
was, in fact, undertaken by Locke, the first great re-
presentative of the empirical school. He was interested
alike in the more obviously empirical sciences of chem-
istry and biology, and in politics. He was not a very
consistent or systematic thinker, but he had other
gifts perhaps as valuable. He was a man of great
common sense and breadth of view, and was able
thereby to take a conspectus of the general situation
in the various spheres of inquiry, to notice the obvious
differences in our knowledge of mathematics, of chemical
and biological fact, and of theology, and to see that
these constituted a problem. We find in hirp the first
statement of the necessity of philosophical criticism.
It is contained in his account of the origin of the Essay
concerning Human Understanding. " Were it fit to
trouble thee with the history of this Essay, I should tell

B

16 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

thee that five or six friends, meeting at my chamber,
and discoursing on a subject very remote fro this "
(they were discussing the " principles of morality and
revealed religion "), " found themselves quickly at a
stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side. After
we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any
nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us,
it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course ;
and that, before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that
nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities,
and see what objects our understandings were, or were
not, fitted to deal with."

We have here the same general starting point of
inquiry as we shall afterwards find in Kant. There
are certain obstinate puzzles which we meet with in
discussion which can only be solved by going back and
inquiring into the nature of knowledge and the powers
of our minds. Unfortunately, as Kant points out,
Locke went the wrong way about his task. He describes
it as " a plain historical inquiry." He thought that he
had only to look into his mind and see what was in it,
as he might open a door and look into a room. The
result is that he thinks of all knowledge as consisting
simply in looking at what is present to the mind. We
can know, therefore, whatever can be present to the
mind, and the limitations of knowledge are discovered
by asking what can be so present to the mind. The
conclusions to which he comes as to different spheres
of human inquiry are roughly these: We can have
knowledge of mathematics because there we are con-
cerned only with ideas present to the mind, and with
noting their agreement and disagreement. We can
have no knowledge of such questions as the immor-
tality of the soul, or the nature of spirits, for they are

THE IDEA OF CRITICISM 17

beyond our observation. As regards existing things,
we can have knowledge of them in so far as they are
present to our minds, and no further. The meaning
of " present to the mind " was never clearly analysed by
Locke ; but he meant, for example, that we can observe
that an object which is yellow, and which we call gold,
is also heavy, and can be dissolved by Aqua Regia,
but we cannot say why that is so, and we ought not,
on Locke's principles, to have any ground for supposing
that these qualities will go on co-existing.

The element of truth in Locke's position is this.
When we are examining concrete things like pieces of
gold or any chemical substance, we find in them
a number of varying qualities whose connection we
cannot understand. We do not know why a metal of
a certain specific gravity should also be yellow ; we
can only note the fact. Hence in chemistry our method
must be quite different from the method of mathematics.
In mathematics we start from the definition, and we
can understand the connection of the properties of a
geometrical figure, and see that they all follow neces-
sarily from the definition. But in sciences like chemistry
a definition does not take us any further ; we can only
find out the properties of a substance by observation
and experiment. Locke explains this difference by
saying that in the former case we are only concerned
with agreement among our own ideas, in the second
place we are concerned somehow with things outside us.
This explanation will not stand. It is not true that
mathematics is simply analysis of an arbitrary defini-
tion, as Locke seems to suggest. It involves construc-
tion, or, as Kant calls it, synthesis. It is a process of
discovering new truths. Secondly, our statements
about concrete objects are not statements of qualities

18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

we see co-existing at the moment. They are state-
ments about all gold or all men ; in other words, they
are universal, and Locke found it impossible to explain
the universality of such propositions — what we mean,
e.g. when we talk about the nature of gold or of man,
not of this gold or this man that I see before me.
Lastly, this distinction of mathematics and the em-
pirical sciences by a distinction of spheres does not
allow, as we saw, for a science like astronomy, which
builds on mathematics and yet applies to the concrete
world.

These difficulties were seen more clearly by Hume,
at once the greatest and the most thorough-going of
empiricists. He cut the knot in regard to mathematics
by asserting that geometry, just because it has clearly
an application to the existing world, had no more
certainty than any other empirical inquiry, while arith-
metic and algebra, he agreed, were certain, but con-
fined their application to the sphere of our own ideas.
Both positions are almost obviously inconsistent with
the facts. In considering the nature of our judgments
about concrete existences he raised a more profound
problem. All such judgments, as he said, imply the
principle of causation, or of what is called, in modern
times, the principle of the uniformity of nature. That
principle we take with us in our investigation of the
existing world. Yet, as Hume saw, we do not observe
causes ; we only observe succession and change. We
seem, therefore, to put into the world we see a necessity
and uniformity which the observed facts do not war-
rant. How is this to be explained ?

Hume's answer is ingenious. The principle of causa-
tion cannot be rationally justified, and the necessary
connection we predicate of changes in the outside world

THE IDEA OF CRITICISM 19

is not in the things ; it is only a feeling in ourselves,
and is the result of custom. After seeing the same
succession several times, we come somehow to feel dif-
ferently about it, and that feeling of difference we
express by saying that we have before us an instance
not of simple succession, but of cause and effect.

This is not the place to discuss the difficulties of
Hume's position ; it is enough to notice how entirely
passive it makes the mind, and how alien such an ex-
planation is from the spirit of inquiry and discovery.
If cause is simply the effect of custom on the mind,
then the facts either produce that effect or they do
not. In neither case is there anything to find out.
But the scientist, in investigating causes, however
strongly he may hold that he has to observe the fact*,
knows also that he has a problem to solve, that he
has to discover the right way to go about it, must
adopt some principle in dealing with the facts. Pure
passivity will help him little.

Hume's account of causation, then, is really a denial
of even empirical science, and yet it helped to make
clear an important truth ; for, although we do not get
the principle of causation from experience, we have to
go to experience to discover causal laws. We do not
discover causation by analysing a cause and seeing that
it is such that, from its nature, it must produce a certain
effect. All knowledge of causation goes back to ob-
served succession, though all cases of observed and
even repeated succession are not cases of causation.
Hume, therefore, was right in saying that where there
could be no observed succession there could be no
knowledge of causation.

Both the rationalistic and the empirical explanations
of science had failed, the one because it could find no

20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

room for observation of facts, the other because it could
find no room for principles governing that observation ;
and we shall see that Kant started with a consciousness
of this double failure. He saw that Hume's criticism
of causation raised problems for which the rationalist
had no answer, and yet that the position reached by
Hume was incompatible with the existence of science.

The same failure of both rationalism and empiricism
had become evident in another sphere — that of morals
and religion. The relation of philosophy to science is
always twofold. Philosophy is partly concerned with
analysing and reflecting on the methods of the different
sciences, partly with seeking to adjust the rival and
conflicting claims of the two great departments of man's
life — science and religion.

It might seem, at first sight, as though in morals
and religion rationalism were the only possible method
to be approved by philosophy, for, inasmuch as morals
are concerned with what ought to be, not with what is,
they cannot depend on observation, but must be deduced
from some principle above experience ; nor are objects
of religion, God and the soul, objects of observation.
No man can " by searching find out God."

It was natural, therefore, that both on the Continent
and in England morality and religion began by being
rationalistic. Descartes believed that his mathematical
method could be applied with success to demonstrate
the truths of religion, while Locke includes morality
along with mathematics among the a priori and certain
sciences. But the history of eighteenth century con-
troversy showed that, in spite of rationalist methods,
neither morality nor religion could attain that certainty
and general agreement which marked the mathematical
sciences. Spinoza, applying the same method as

THE IDEA OF CRITICISM 21

Descartes, but with more consistency, arrived at a
conception of God which most of -his contemporaries
regarded as " horrid atheism," and the general result
of rational theology is well described by one of Kant's
correspondents when he says that the more proofs of
the existence of God he learnt, the more his doubts
increased. In England the attempts made to found
morality upon rationalist principles produced systems
too barren to withstand the attack of empiricism
fortified by the growing interest in history and anthro-
pology. The Deist movement, an attempt to free
religion from the incrustations of faith and deduce it
from pure reason, showed that a religion founded on
pure reason contained nothing worth believing. In
Hume we have the final discrediting of reason in these
spheres. He shows ingeniously that " the good
Berkeley's " argument for the existence of God could
be turned round to disprove the existence of the soul,
and he concluded that religion was a sphere with which
reason had no concern. In the sphere of morals the
distinction between what ought to be and what is, the
distinction on which rationalistic morals are based, had
been discredited by a reduction of all conduct to Utili-
tarianism, a search for pleasure and a flight from pain
mediated by sympathy. The consequences are de-
scribed by Kant in his preface to the Critique of Pure
Reason : " At present, after everything has been
tried, so they say, and tried in vain, there reign in
philosophy weariness and complete indifferent ism, the
mother of chaos and night in all sciences," though he
hopefully continues, " but at the same time the source,
or at least the prelude, of their near reform and of a
new light, after an ill-applied study has rendered them
dark, confused, and useless."

22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

The earlier of the modern thinkers — Descartes among
the rationalists, and Bacon among the empiricists — are
full of hope. They have confidence in the human spirit.
But increased reflection seemed only to bring distrust
with it. The history of rationalism in theology showed
that, in such matters, reason could prove absolutely
opposing positions. Most men were ready to accept
Hume's dictum that any one who follows his reason
must be a fool and take refuge in an indifferentism
which accepts whatever happens to be there.

The remedy for this state of affairs, Kant finds, is
the critical method ; for disbelief in reason is the re-
action from overconfidence in it. Men had thought
that reason could prove everything. Because these
hopes had been frustrated, they now thought that it
could prove nothing. Philosophy, he was convinced,
would oscillate between overweening confidence and
unwarranted distrust in itself until it had criticised
human reason and discovered what it could do and
what it could not. This is the task he set before him-
self. As the failure of eighteenth century philosophy,
which had led to distrust of all philosophy, had been
twofold — failure to give an intelligible explanation of
the processes of scientific thought, and failure to find
any standard by which to mediate between the con-
flicting claims of science and religion — the task of the
critical philosophy is twofold. It attempts to explain
and to justify the methods and assumptions of the
sciences, and to find some solution of the conflict be-
tween theories of the world which seem to be based
upon these methods and the assumptions and claims of
morality and religion.

CHAPTER II

kant's statement of the problem, synthetic
a priori judgments

In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of
Pure Reason Kant finds the necessity of criticism in the
contrast between certain rational sciences and meta-
physics. Mathematics and physics, he observes, are
obviously certain sciences. They are not empirical,
they make steady progress, the results they have reached
are secure and unanimously accepted, and have a cer-
tainty which no mere empirical investigation could
attain. Metaphysics, on the other hand, though as
ancient an inquiry, seems incapable of any settled
results. Its history is a record, not of steady progress,
but of bewildering marches and countermarches. The
confident conclusions of one philosopher are as confi-
dently denied by another, and the endless indecisive
conflict produces in the minds of most men the con-
viction that in philosophy one doctrine is as good as
another, and therefore none are worth very much. In
the sphere where reason might be expected to be most
at home, reason is impotent ; yet the achievements of
reason in those other spheres of the a priori sciences
should preserve us from any general scepticism of the
powers of reason. The task of criticism will be to
examine the part played by reason in science, and to
ask how far its failure in metaphvsics is due to mistakes

23

24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

in method, and how far to the different nature of the
objects of the a priori sciences and of metaphysics.
Kant points out that it was some time before either
mathematics or physics followed the secure path of a
science. The contrast between the haphazard and
empirical observations of the Babylonians or Egyptians
and the science of the Greeks was due to the discovery
of a new method. The discovery by Galileo and
Torricelli of modern physics came about by a similar
revolution in method. The Critique, therefore, is to
be a treatise on method. It will examine the method
of reason in the sciences, and ask what conclusions
can be drawn as to the proper method of meta-
physics.

In the Prolegomena, a work in which he summarises
the results of the first Critique, Kant describes the
Critique as an answer to three questions : How is mathe-
matics possible ? How is pure science of nature or
physics possible ? and, How is metaphysics possible ?
Something of the nature of his answer to the third,
and for him the most important, question, may be
gathered from the fact that he explains that the third
question should not be put in the form, How is meta-
physics as a science possible % That question can only
be answered by saying that it is not possible. But it
is still allowable and necessary to ask, How is meta-
physics possible as a natural disposition of the mind ?
For the main result of his inquiries into the place of
reason in the sciences is to show that reason is suc-
cessful in the sciences only because of the presence of
certain conditions which are wanting in metaphysics.
At first sight we might think it natural that the ob-
jects of metaphysics which Kant enumerates as God,

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 25

Freedom, and Immortality should be understood by
reason, and fisd it more difficult to explain how reason
should apply to the world of ordinary experience. The
knowledge of everyday things is thought of as empirical,
a matter of observation ; while we are inclined to think
that, if there is rational knowledge, it is knowledge of
something else, of the mere agreement or disagreement
of ideas (as Hume thought), or of the essences of things,
known independently and apart from perception, as
Plato thought. Kant argues that the combination of
a priori reasoning and empirical observation, which
earlier thinkers had found so puzzling in the exact
sciences, exhibits the only possible use of reason, that
reason, divorced from and with no reference to the
world of experience, is barren, and that consequently
metaphysics, if that be taken to mean a rational know-
ledge of objects which are outside of our experience,
does not exist. We are left with metaphysics as a
natural disposition ; for Kant holds that the questions
which metaphysics seeks to answer arise from the
nature of reason and its relation to experience, though
their answer is to be sought not in knowledge but in
action.

This last point must be elucidated later. In the
meantime we must see how this inquiry into the nature
of reason crystalises itself into a seemingly abstract
and trivial question : How are synthetic a priori judg-
ments possible ? It is baffling at first to find an inquiry
of the scope we have indicated suddenly take such a
narrow form, but a little consideration will show the
importance of the question. Knowledge may be re-
garded as either analysis or synthesis, as a puzzling
out or unravelling of what we somehow know already,

26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

or as a putting together of what had previously been
known or observed separately. The rationalist school,
whom we described in the last chapter, were inclined to
regard all knowledge as analytical. They thought of
progress in knowledge as an advance from obscure to
clear apprehension, and as a thinking out or making clear
of something which had always been known somehow.
Mathematics, the typical form of knowledge for the
rationalists, had been thought of as the analysis of what
was implied or given in the definitions. The conception
of analytic a priori knowledge was thus familiar and
simple. On the other hand, the empiricists had thought
of knowledge as primarily synthesis — or, as they called
it, association — a connecting together of ideas in their
nature separate. Knowledge of a thing was thought
of as the observing together of several ideas. Judg-
ments about objects were regarded as judgments about
the co-existence of separate ideas, ideas which were not
thought of as being bound by any logical necessity.
We do not understand why a substance with the specific
gravity of gold should be yellow ; we only observe the
co-existence of certain qualities. The judgment, then,
gold is yellow, is synthetic ; it is an assertion of the
co-existence of separate qualities. It is also empirical ;
it does not express a reasoned insight into the necessary
connection of gold and yellow. It seems rather a record
of observation. Synthetic knowledge, then, was thought
of as in its nature empirical and a posteriori. Hume,
who thought of all knowledge of the world in experience
as synthetic, denied to such knowledge any necessity
or certainty.

Hume, however, had noticed that the principle of
causation, the judgment that every event has a cause,

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 27

is both a priori and synthetic. It is not, he held, de-
rived from experience ; rather it is a principle which
guides our investigation of experience. It is not got
from analysis of the notion of causation, nor is it simply
concerned with the agreement or disagreement of our
ideas. It asserts the necessary connection of two
perfectly separate existing things. Hume himself, as
we saw, tried to explain away these uncomfortable
facts. He was too wedded to his belief that all know-
ledge was derived from passively received impressions
to face them rightly. Kant, coming to the problem
with different prepossessions, with the belief that most
knowledge was analytic, was impressed with Hume's
proof that the principle of causation could not be de-
rived from analysis. The very basis of all science of
nature, then, contradicted the belief that knowledge
was analytical. Kant was also, with Hume, convinced
that the principle of causation was not derived from
experience, for he saw that experience assumed it. At
the same time, he was not prepared, like Hume, to
explain it away. Further, he saw that the problem
raised by the principle of causation was a wide one.
For other judgments, he held, are both synthetic and
a priori, among them mathematical judgments. As we
shall see afterwards, Kant proved the impossibility of
arriving at knowledge of God or the soul by mere analysis
of concepts. The judgments of metaphysics, about
God or the soul, are also synthetic. But the validity
of the judgments of metaphysics is under dispute.
If we examine the synthetic a priori judgments of
mathematics and of science whose validity is certain,
we may then discover whether such judgments in meta-
physics can or can not have similar certainty. We may

28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

thus see that the problem of the possibility of synthetic a
priori judgments is a restatement in logical terms of the
problem of the relation between the a priori sciences
and metaphysics.

Something more must be said of the importance of
synthetic a priori judgments in Kant's account of
knowledge. Their existence, we have seen, exposes the
shortcomings of both rationalism, which allowed only
for analytic a priori judgments, and empiricism, which
allowed only of synthetic a posteriori judgments. Both
these theories tended to regard knowledge as an analysis
or description of what was present to the mind, and
differed really only in their view of what was present.
For, though the empiricist thought of empirical know-
ledge as synthesis, the synthesis was not ascribed to the
mind, but to associating ideas ; the mind only ob-
served, and knowledge was merely the apprehension
of objects by the senses. We see what is before our
eyes, and notice the differences and similarities in what
is before us. The rationalist conceived of thought as
simply apprehending the nature of the real, freed from
the illusions of sense perception. The mathematician
has before his thought the nature of a triangle, and
sees intellectually what that nature implies. We may
try to mediate between the two by saying that while
all knowing is observing, some is observing of objects
of thought and some of objects of sense, the one being
called understanding, the other perception. In most
scientific judgments, however, we are not simply observ-
ing objects either of thought or of sense. Scientific
judgments are more than descriptions of what is present
to the mind or to the senses ; they are essentially
anticipations. They go beyond what is immediately

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 29

given. This is shown by the fact that it is the char-
acteristic of a scientific proposition that it can be
verified. If we understand it rightly, we see that it
implies that, under such-and-such conditions, such-and-
such things will be experienced. Hence the importance
of experiment to science. A scientific proposition is, of
course, grounded on observation of perceived fact and
understanding of universal connection, but it is an
assertion of something beyond that.

If, then, all scientific judgments are synthetic, and if
both rationalism and empiricism failed to account for
the manner in which such judgments go beyond what is
immediately given to the mind, ought we not to say
that the real problem for Kant is to show not merely
how synthetic a priori judgments are possible, but how
any synthetic judgments are possible ? This seems
at first sight plausible, but the suggestion must be
rejected; for, when Kant asks how a judgment is
possible, he is not asking how we come to make it, but
how we know that it is valid. Now, if we consider
any empirical judgment about the facts of nature, we
must recognise that Locke and Hume were right in
denying certainty to such judgments. In all general
statements about concrete facts we to a certain extent
go beyond our evidence. Empirical scientific state-
ments are not theoretically certain. They may, of
course, be certain enough for all practical purposes.
They are reasonable expectations of what will happen,
but reasonable expectation is a very different thing
from the certainty of mathematical insight.

Now Kant maintained that, while such empirical
judgments are not certain, they all imply the certainty
of a number of general principles on which they depend.

30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

These general principles are the synthetic a priori judg-
ments with which he is especially concerned. When
we apply the principles of trigonometry to an engineer-
ing problem, we know that our measurements are only
approximate, and that the result also will only be
approximate ; but the possibility of arriving at such
approximate results depends on the absolute truth of
the trigonometrical principles, and on the assumption
that they express not simply the agreement or disagree-
ment of ideas, but hold of the real. When we apply
the rules of arithmetic to counting objects, there may
be a certain arbitrariness in deciding on our unit. There
is no such arbitrariness in the rule. All scientific
judgments of causation are only approximately certain,
but they all imply the certainty of the principle of
causation, and are based on the assumption that such
a principle is of universal application. This and the
other principles assumed in our empirical judgments
are, then, the synthetic judgments with which Kant is
concerned. Now, it is of the nature of our empirical
knowledge that it is fragmentary and not uniform, that
we are concerned with an indefinite number of things
whose connections we do not wholly understand, and
which we cannot therefore anticipate. Yet we assume
that all these objects will obey the rules of arithmetic
and geometry, and will all be subject in their changes
to the principle of causation. On such assumptions all
the sciences of applied mathematics depend. How are
they justifiable ? That is Kant's question.

Kant, when he considers mathematics, is concerned
with the assumptions of applied mathematics, of those
sciences which, though mathematical, make statements
about existing objects, and in which the old distinction

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 31

between understanding and perception which was based
on the difference in the objects of these two faculties
breaks down. The sciences which Kant is investigating
imply that principles which are clearly not derived
from mere observation are yet the basis on which we
order and arrange what we observe. Now, if we held
that the objects of mathematics were independent en-
tities quite separate from the things we perceive, it
would be impossible to explain how we might assume
that the things we perceive would be subject to the
rules of mathematics. If, on the other hand, we held
that in mathematics we were simply concerned with the
various objects of the senses, it would be impossible to
explain how mathematics can have a generality and
necessity which no statements can have which rest on
observation of the various things we see. The exist-
ence of applied mathematics implies firstly that under-
standing and perception are distinct, and that neither
of them can be reduced to the other, for that would
mean that we should have to give up either the element
of observation and experiment or the element of neces-
sity and a priority, and secondly, that understanding
and perception are combined, and must be combined
for any advance in science.

Now, Kant finds his answer to the problem he has
raised by concentrating his attention on the fact that,
while understanding and perception are distinct, they
are both present in all knowledge. His argument is
that we are necessarily in a difficulty if we think of
understanding and perception as having each its sepa-
rate objects, and then try to explain their combination.
If we begin with their combination, we may see that the
reference of principles of thought to objects of sense is

c

32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

not an accident, but that these principles of thought or
of understanding, as Kant calls them, are only con-
cerned with objects of sense, and have no other mean-
ing. If we object, But how can principles of thought
be universal if they are concerned with the many and
varying objects of sense ? Kant's answer is that they
are not concerned directly with these objects, but with
the conditions under which these objects can be under-
stood. They are therefore not statements about objects,
but statements of the conditions of possible experience.
If we find out that all perceiving and thinking imply
certain conditions, then we can affirm the validity of
principles based upon these conditions, so long as we
do not try to apply the principles beyond our per-
ceiving.

We may put the point in another way by asking by
what right the mind can prescribe to or anticipate ex-
perience. Kant's answer is just in so far as we can
determine the conditions under which alone objects
can be known. If that can be done, we can say, These
principles will hold of objects in so far as they are
known. In the preface to the second edition of the
Critique of Pure Reason Kant reverts to the discoveries
of Galileo and Torricelli, and points out that their success
was due to their asking of nature the right question, and
the right question was that which reason could under-
stand. " When Galileo let balls of a particular weight,
which he had determined himself, roll down an inclined
plane, or Torricelli made the air carry a weight, which
he had previously determined to be equal to that of a
definite volume of water, a new light flashed on all
students of nature. They comprehended that reason
has insight into that only which she herself produces
on her own plan, and that she must move forward with

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 33

the principles of her judgments, according to fixed law,
and compel nature to answer her questions, but not let
herself be led by nature, as it were in leading-strings.
Otherwise accidental observations, made on no previ-
ously fixed plan, will never converge towards a necessary
law, which is the only thing that reason seeks or requires.
Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to
which alone concordant phenomena can be admitted as
laws of nature, and in the other the experiment which it
has devised according to those principles, must approach
nature in order to be taught by it, but not in the char-
acter of a pupil who agrees to everything the master likes,
but as an appointed judge, who compels the witnesses
to answer the questions which he himself proposes."

Kant, here, is concerned with reason in its applica-
tion to experience, and he makes it clear that there is
much in all such inquiries which cannot be anticipated
a priori. " Reason must approach nature in order to
be taught by it." The answer to the questions and
experiments cannot be known beforehand. The em-
pirical element in science cannot be explained away.
Reason dictates not the answer but the question, and
so far the form of the answer. Reason, then, it is
suggested, is concerned with the principles or con-
ditions, according to which we can understand things.
It is not a method of observing or analysing objects ;
rather it states the methods and principles according
to which objects must be observed if they are to be
understood. The principles are not statements about
the nature of objects, but principles of the possibility
of experience. This new attitude to reason Kant de-
scribes as the Copernican change in philosophy. It
constitutes Kant's idealism. Its nature and importance
we must examine in the next chapter.

CHAPTER III

KANT'S idealism, time and space

The great discovery which Kant considered he had
made as to the nature of reason was that reason was
not a method of observing objects as they really exist,
but was concerned directly only with our ways of under-
standing objects. This discovery is the essence of
Kant's idealism, and its main purport is expressed in
the distinction Kant so often makes between things in
themselves and phenomena. This distinction is used
as the key to the solution of all his difficulties. But
the doctrine it implies is very easy to misunderstand,
partly because idealism is generally used in a very
different sense from that in which Kant uses it, partly
because Kant's statement of the distinction between
things in themselves and phenomena depended on a
view of knowledge which he was very much concerned
to refute, but with which we are not now familiar. If
we are to understand Kant's philosophy, we must know
what he means by idealism, and wherein his idealism
differs from that of his predecessors.

The word idealism is, naturally, contrasted with
realism. It suggests an assertion that something is not
real, but only an idea. If we know it to be combined
with a distinction between things in themselves, and
phenomena, or appearances, it seems to suggest that

the objects of knowledge are somehow illusions, or only

u

HIS IDEALISM 35

appearances in the mind, as contrasted with real things.
Something like this had been held by Kant's prede-
cessors. For the fimdamental principle of the idealism
on which most of Kant's predecessors had been agreed,
and which is sometimes called Cartesian, and sometimes
subjective idealism, is that the mind somehow knows
itself and its own actions and states, with more direct-
ness and certainty than it knows external objects. The
doctrine is commonly based upon a confused view of
sense perception.

Sense perception is obviously possible only through
processes in the sensory organs, and objects were
thought of as producing impressions through the sensory
organs in the brain, and the mind as then becoming
aware of them in the brain. Hence, when Locke says
that the mind only knows its own ideas, he tends to
mean (though the facts are sometimes too much for
him and he is nobly inconsistent) that the mind only
knows objects inside the brain. The main objection to
this doctrine, apart from the fact that it is based on a
confusion, is that it makes it quite inexplicable how the
notion of an outside world ever arises. For if we know,
and must eternally know, only ideas inside our head,
why should we ever imagine that there an outside
world exists. Yet if nothing outside us were observed
— if we knew of no process which went on between
outside objects and the brain, the doctrine would have
no basis on which to rest. There cannot be any mean-
ing in saying something is " only an idea," if we do not
know what is real in the sense of its having an existence
independent of our minds.

Locke supposed that, although we knew only ideas,
we could somehow refer from our ideas to an outside

36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

world. For he thought that truth was concerned with
the agreement of our ideas with reality. This form of
the doctrine, the commonest, is sometimes called
Representationism. For it thinks of the mind as con-
cerned with representations, or pictures, or images which
it may compare with the real objects. Its futility is
obvious enough. We can only compare a picture with
the thing it represents, if we can know both. If we can
only know ideas, we can never know that they are only
ideas, and can never compare them with anythhig else.

This difficulty was seen by Berkeley, the most con-
sistent of subjective idealists, and led him to deny the
existence of outside objects, and hold that existence or
reality meant being perceived and nothing more. But
if we take Berkeley's position, it becomes very difficult
to say what we mean by judgments being true. If
things only exist as we think of them, or perceive them,
or rather if they are only our thinking of or perceiving
them, the question of the truth or falsity of our state-
ments about them cannot arise.

This idealism Kant is careful to refute, and he points
out that there is no evidence for its fundamental pro-
position that we know our mind more directly than we
know objects. We are only conscious of ourselves in
knowing something not ourselves. We do not invent
the notion of externality or outsideness in space from
an experience in which it originally has no part. Ex-
ternality is implied in our most simple experience. We
begin with consciousness of outside things, and only
become conscious of our own mental states or pro-
cesses later. But it is important to observe that the
truth or falsity of subjective idealism has no bearing
whatsoever on the question with which Kant was con-

HIS IDEALISM 37

cerned. If I ask how I can lay down rules about what
I have not yet experienced, I am not -in the least helped
by being told that I only experience what is in my mind.
For the question will equally arise, How do I know
what is going to be in my mind ? The question
idealism ordinarily discusses, as to whether the objects
of our awareness are in our mind or outside, are in
their nature mental and dependent on the mind or
not, is entirely and absolutely irrelevant to Kant's
purposes.

But it is a fact, and one that has got to be explained,
that in judgment we go beyond what is present to our
minds, and that, in so anticipating what we shall ex-
perience, we assume that certain principles hold of all
that has been or may be present. With that difficulty
idealism, as ordinarily understood, has nothing to do.
Representationism tried to give some account of this
going beyond what is present to our minds by sug-
gesting that truth is a reference from ideas to reality ;
but, as we saw, if we know only ideas, such a reference
is impossible. The doctrines opposed to representa-
tionism, that only ideas exist, or that we directly
know real objects, allow the existence of nothing con-
trasted with what we are apprehending to which a
reference in judgment can be made. No one who is
satisfied with any of these positions can have seen
Kant's problem.

If Kant, then, is not a subjective idealist, what does
he mean by saying, as he constantly does, that we only
know phenomena, and why should that limitation of
knowledge help him in any of his difficulties ? He
means, in the first place, that all knowledge depends
upon perception. The first paragraph of the first part

38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

of the Critique of Pure Reason makes that clear. " What-
ever the process and the means may be by which
knowledge reaches its objects, there is one that reaches
them directly and forms the ultimate material of all
thought, viz. perception. This is possible only when
the object is given, and the object can be given only (to
human beings, at least) through a certain affection of
the mind."

Now, although we perceive an objective reality,
sense perception obviously gives a very imperfect know-
ledge of objects. We see only some sides and aspects
of things, and not others. What we see depends on
changes in our position. Further, we know that what
we see is only a small part of the nature of anything.
We think of reality as an interconnected system, but
we only perceive a very small part of it, and what we
perceive depends upon the particular time and the
particular part of space in which we live. In our ex-
perience we are never really content simply with what
we perceive ; we perceive much too little for that.
We are always inferring from what we see to something
beyond it. What is that something beyond, which, as
we have seen, is implied in all judgment ? We might
hold that it was the things as they really are as dis-
tinguished from things as they appear, or phenomena,
and that, when we turned from perception to thought,
we turned from illusion to reality. Kant denied this.
He held that, if you examine a scientific judgment
about anything you perceive, such as that yellow thing
is gold, you will find that, if you know what the judg-
ment means, you will be able to say : Then, under
such-and-such conditions — if you weigh it, for example —
you will have such-and-such a perception. The appeal

HIS IDEALISM 39

is not from what you perceive to what you think, but
from what you perceive now to what you will perceive
under such-and-such conditions. Such a reference,
indeed, implies thought and what is ordinarily called
a concept ; but our knowledge of concepts used in
science always means that, if we know what is meant,
e.g. by calling anything gold, we know how it will
behave under such-and-such conditions. The concept,
in Kant's words, is a function of unity in our re-
presentations. The task of thought, then, is not to
turn the mind away from what we perceive, but to help
us to transcend some of the limitations of our percep-
tions, or, to speak more accurately, to set somewhat
further back the limits of our perception ; for thought
never entirely transcends these limits. Our knowledge
is always conditioned by the fact that we are finite
minds living in a particular place and at a particular
time ; but thought can extend the range of our per-
ception in space and in time.

The limitations of our perception have, for Kant, a
double aspect, which determines his division of the first
part of the Critique into two parts — the jLitJutic and the
Analytic. In the first place, our direct knowledge of
space at any one time is always knowledge only of a
part of space ; our direct knowledge of time, whether
in present consciousness or in memory of our own ex-
perience, is knowledge of only a part of time ; and the
things in the space we directly perceive, or in the time
we experience, are what they are by their relation to
space outside the space we see, and time beyond the
time we experience, and that limited space and time we
treat, therefore, as parts of one all-embracing space and
one all-embracing time, and in the conception of an

40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

indefinitely extended space and time we can think of
the space in which all things exist, and the time in which
all things occur, of which we only see and experience a
small part. The science of astronomy obviously talks
of space and time far beyond anything we could ever
perceive, but we go beyond such direct perception in
such simple expressions as " forty miles from here " or
" three days hence." And, when Kant says that space
and time are only phenomenal, he does not mean that
they are mental, but that we only know them through
perception, and that we get at absolute space and time
not by going from what we perceive to what we think,
but by thinking of what we perceive indefinitely ex-
tended. All definite statements about space must
come back in the end to "so far from here" all about
time to "so long from now," and the fact that all our
knowledge of space and time is got by adding to or
extending in thought the space and time we directly
perceive does, according to Kant, solve some obstinate
puzzles about the nature of space and time.

In the second place, if we consider our knowledge of
objects, we realise that, as we said, at any one moment
we only perceive them in part or from one position.
What we directly perceive of them is fragmentary and
discontinuous, one aspect seen now, and another aspect
seen at another time. But we do not think of the
things as existing in that discontinuous way ; we think
of them as having a nature of their own. That does
not contradict, but is something very much more than,
what we perceive, and our knowledge of any object
is got by piecing together the aspects we directly per-
ceive ; but that piecing together, or synthesis, is not
haphazard. It is governed by rules — rules partly derived

HIS IDEALISM 41

from the nature of the particular thing we are concerned
with, and partly more general rules, which come from
the relation of this work of piecing together to the
framework of space and time by help of which it is
done.

Kant's conception of knowledge, then, is something
like this. Each of us is in direct contact with reality,
but we perceive directly only a small part of it, and, as
our consciousness moves on in time, and as we change
our position in space, we are directly conscious of dif-
ferent small portions of reality. A part of the whole
is illumined by direct perception, but the whole stretches
beyond that indefinitely in space and time. In the
part we directly perceive there is a temporal order and
a spatial order. Things are given to us arranged in
space and ordered in time, and these arrangements or
orders in the space and time that is directly given to
us in perception have certain rules, and we think of
these principles of arrangement as extending indefinitely
beyond the space and time given to us in perception.
When we make judgments about reality beyond our
perception, we think of things as so arranged in the
space and time beyond our perception as we should
see them arranged were the range of our perception
sufficiently wide. Further, it is most important to re-
member that we do not remain in one place and at one
time and make guesses of what may happen in the
darkness beyond. Though our perception at any one
moment is limited, we can connect what we see at one
time with what we see at another. We can, by means
of language and writing, use the perception of others
to fill out our experience, until gradually our scientific
judgments, our knowledge of what we should perceive

42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

under all sorts of possible experience, seems to bulk
much more largely than could our individual percep-
tions. But we are still, Kant would say, getting at our
knowledge of what is beyond by piecing together what
we and other people have perceived, and the whole is
always much more than that.

What, then, is meant by the contention that we can
know things in themselves which Kant is earnest to
refute ? It might mean that we do in perception attain
to a complete knowledge, but that would be obviously
untrue. As Kant understood the claim, it meant rather
something like this : In thought we are obviously not
limited by our perception. We are always assuming
certain principles, such as the laws of space or the
principle of causation, to hold of all reality, both what
we do and what we do not directly perceive. May we
not say, then, that these principles hold of all reality,
and argue from that fact to what the nature of the
whole must be ? If everything that we know is caused,
e.g., may we not apply the principle of causation to all
reality and say that it must have a cause ?

When we come to consider the Dialectic, the second
main division of the first Critique, we shall notice Kant's
detailed analysis of these arguments, and how he points
out that you can in this way get contradictory results.
In the meantime it must be observed that in these
arguments we start from principles applied to what
we perceive and expressing connections between the
different things we perceive, and then apply them
beyond everything we do or could perceive. That
means that we imagine that we can take these principles
out of relation not only to this or that detail of per-
ception, but out of relation to any perception at all,

HIS IDEALISM 43

and thus apprehend reality by thought independently
of perception.

Kant's answer is that thought cannot directly appre-
hend the nature of the whole, and these universal prin-
ciples, such as the principle of causation, are only
principles by which we connect one perception with
another to amend the discontinuous and fragmentary
nature of our perception ; they are rules for the syn-
thesis of what we perceive. By so synthesising our per-
ceptions we come to a less imperfect knowledge of the
whole, but apart from perceptions the principles have
no meaning at all.

Kant's idealism, i.e. his insistence that we know only
phenomena, not things in themselves, is relevant to his
problem, because it implies the denial of the view that
thought has objects apprehended independently of per-
ception, and because it insists that we can only know
directly what we perceive, or things as they appear to
us, that in our process from perception to knowledge we
start with what is present to our perception and end
with what is or with what might be present to our
perception, and that this process is possible by reason
of our continued consciousness in time. The process,
Kant holds, is governed by certain principles. These
depend upon the part played by space and time in all
our perception, and the manner in which we employ
space and time in piecing together our discontinuous
perceptions.

Now, obviously it is quite possible to hold this position
without having thought out what is implied in being
present to the mind in perception. This is what Kant
did. He describes perception in different and incon-
sistent ways. The reason for this inconsistency is that

44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

Kant is not concerned with the nature of perception,
but with the relation of what is immediately perceived
to what is not but may be immediately perceived, and
he therefore never worked out any consistent account
of perception. He sometimes talks of perception
reaching objects directly, and refutes the view that
we perceive only what is in our mind. (This, indeed,
is implied in his distinction of space and time as
forms of external and internal sense respectively.) But
usually he takes the ordinary idealist view that we do
not perceive things, but affections produced in us by
things. Owing to this inconsistency Kant constantly
seems to be stating very much more than he has any
right to. This is especially true in all that he says
about knowledge being confined to phenomena and not
extending to things in themselves. When he talks of
our knowing only phenomena, he sometimes seems to
mean that we know objects, things in themselves, only
in part, in so far as they appear to us. That would
make the distinction between the phenomenon and
the thing in itself a distinction between the same thing
imperfectly and perfectly understood. He sometimes,
and this is his more usual view, seems to mean that
we are aware of appearances, entities separate and dis-
tinguishable from the objects which produce them in
our minds. But if we work out in any of Kant's argu-
ments the point of his appeal to the fact that knowledge
is only of phenomena, we shall find that in every case
the difference between a subjective idealist and a realist
view of perception, of what " being present to the mind "
means, is irrelevant, and that his argument holds on
either theory.

We must now turn to Kant's account of space and

HIS IDEALISM 45

time which is given in the JZsthetic, the first part of
the Critique. He begins by showing the impossibility
of the two views of the nature of space and time which
then held the field, the views of Newton and Leibniz.
Newton had thought of space and time as realities,
things in themselves existing along with other things.
But obviously we cannot think of space as a separate
thing existing by itself ; for space without things would
have no determination or possibility of determination,
and would be to us just nothing, whereas, as it is, it is
something to us. The same holds of time. The New-
tonian doctrine, Kant says, " forces us to assume two
eternal, infinite, and self-subsisting non-realities, which
are there, without any reality in them, only that they
may comprehend all reality." Just because things are
in space and time, space and time are not themselves
things. But if this makes us say that space and time
are only relations between or qualities of things, we find
ourselves in difficulties as obvious. We do not come
to apprehend space and time by comparing things and
seeing that they have a common quality of being
M spatial " or " temporal," as we come to apprehend
redness, e.g., by seeing red things. The perception
of space and time is implied in each and every
perception of things. We cannot, therefore, derive
them from our study of things; we must begin with
them. Further, Kant notices, as against Leibniz, that
space and time are not ordinary concepts because they
have no instances. Different men are instances of man,
but different spaces or times are only parts or deter-
minations of the one space and the one time. As
against the view, then, that would make space and time
only relations, derived from our comparison of things

46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

which are not temporal or spatial, Kant insists that
space and time are a priori. We cannot see things
without seeing them outside one another — i.e. in space —
or experience succession or change without experiencing
it in time. Space and time, then, have a certain inde-
pendence of things in space and time. The qualitative
differences of things in space or events in time do not
affect the nature of space and time, and we can and do
study and discuss spatial and temporal relations quite
independently of such differences.

Space and time, then, can be abstracted from things
in space and time. Yet, on the other hand, we cannot
think that space and time exist independently of
things. They do not exist in abstraction ; for,
though the specific differences of things in space and
time are irrelevant to the nature of space and time,
if there were no things, or if there were no differences,
there could be no space and time as we know them.
" The empirical perception," saj^s Kant, " is not com-
pounded of phenomena and space, of the sensation
and the empty perception." Space and time, therefore,
Kant says, are not things in themselves.

What, then, are they ? Kant's answer is that they
are forms of our perception. Space is the form of ex-
ternal perception, and time is the form of internal
perception, and Kant holds that by this answer we can
understand both how our knowledge of space and time
may be a priori, how spatial and temporal distinc-
tions may be abstracted from the differences of things,
and how we may avoid the difficulties consequent on
regarding time and space as independent things.

What, then, does Kant mean by form ? He seems to
mean two things, which he does not clearly distinguish.

HIS IDEALISM 47

The first meaning is best described in his own words :
" In the phenomenon I call what corresponds to the
sensation the matter of the phenomenon, and that
which causes that the manifold of the phenomenon is
perceived as arranged in specific relations I call the
form of the phenomenon." We are here face to face
with the ultimate difference of form and matter, or order
and that which is ordered. When Kant calls time and
space the form of our perception he is simply calling
attention to the fact that in all that we perceive we find
this distinction. It is something found, given, not made
by us. By the word " form " Kant does not mean
anything specially subjective as contrasted with matter
or content, for he carefully distinguishes between space
and time, and such qualities as colour, which get their
nature in part, he thinks, from the specific nature of
the sense organ. Compared with such qualities space
and time are objective. The phrase " forms of our
perception," then, does not really explain anything
about space and time ; it only emphasises the fact that
the distinction between space and time and objects in
them is found in what we perceive, and that there is
no meaning in discussing either side of the distinction as
though it were quite independent of what we perceive.

But form has also another meaning which justifies
Kant in calling space and time only forms of our per-
ception, and hence subjective. For, while these forms
are found in what we perceive, the distinctive part
which they play in our knowledge is due to the fact that
we use space and time as a framework by which to
connect our scattered experiences. We come to think
of the space and time we perceive as parts of an ab-
solute space and an absolute time. We perceive parts

48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

of space and time, but absolute space and absolute time
we do not perceive. They are the form we perceive
imagined indefinitely extended. We order the par-
ticular parts of space and time which we do perceive
in reference to absolute space and time. Yet absolute
space and time are only known through the finite parts
of space and time which we actually experience. Hence
absolute space and time are not perceived realities or
perceived orders, but ways in which we organise and
arrange what we perceive. Now, the qualities of space
and time which are hard to think of as the qualities
of a thing that exists, i.e. their infinite divisibility and
infinite extension, are qualities of absolute space and
time. When we say that space is infinitely divisible,
we do not mean that any existing thing is made up of
an infinite number of parts. The divisibility of space
and the divisibility of matter are quite different. An
inch as a spatial determination is infinitely divisible,
but the divisibility of the actual stuff which any inch
may measure is a matter of empirical investigation,
and ought to admit of a definite answer. That means
that, while we use determinations of space which we
consider infinitely divisible and infinitely extensible to
measure things in space, we do not consider that these
determinations, fractions, or multiples of inches or centi-
metres, have anything to do with the constitution of
the thing they measure. It was not put together in
fractions of inches. Thus we must distinguish between
space as the form of what we perceive, the next-each-
otherness of things, and the use we make of that form
to construct by means of measurement order in all
different perception. The first is obviously the form
only of what we perceive, and gives rise to no tran-

HIS IDEALISM 49

scendental questions. But the second, infinite space,
though it seems to transcend our perception, has still
only meaning in reference to perception, is only a way
of ordering our perceptions. The same holds good of
time.

We can see now what Kant means by saying that
time and space are enipiricallj* real and transcendentally
ideal. Kant does not maintain that space and time
are illusions. They are a constant element of what is
given us in perception. It is only when we try and
go beyond our perceptions, and take space and time
as things existing independently of what we perceive,
thus trying to transcend the limits of possible per-
ception, that we fall into illusion. Space and time
have meaning only as elements in what we perceive, or
in connecting what we perceive now with what we
may perceive.

CHAPTER IV

THE CATEGORIES AND THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE
UNDERSTANDING

Kant makes the distinction between perception and
understanding depend upon the distinction between
the receptivity and the spontaneity of the mind. In the
JSsthetic he has been concerned with time and space as
elements in what seems to be given to the mind. Be-
fore we begin to ask the questions of science, before we
analyse, describe, or classify, before we have to think,
we perceive. Time and space are not got at by
thinking or generalisation. For before we can say any-
thing about any part of our experience, it is given us in a
certain spatial and temporal order. If we open our
eyes at any moment, we are, without any conscious
effort of thought on our part, confronted with an
elaborate content. It seems simple to distinguish
this receptive attitude of the mind in perception from
its activity in thinking.

The distinction is not really so simple as it appears.
For we all know that what we perceive depends, at
least to some extent, on the mind's activity. We are
familiar with the reflection that men see what they
want to see or what they are looking for. This is
clearly shown in the case of hearing by the difference in
what we hear when we are listening to a language we
understand and when we are listening to an unfamiliar

50

PRINCIPLES OF UNDERSTANDING 51

language, or in the common experience when, after
failing to hear what someone has said,, we think what it
must have been, and then seem to recall the sound,
not as we heard it, but as we should have heard it if
we had heard it rightly. Anyone who reflects on the
process of fast reading will realise that we do not
perceive or notice all the letters on a page ; we fill in
from our imagination, as we discover when we read
words that are not on the page. It is a very hard
thing, giving up all interpretation and inference, to de-
scribe faithfully just what is there to see.

Passive perception, then, does not exist, and our
thought affects our perception. Yet, at the same time,
the distinction between thought and perception, although
not simple, is real. For although our previous thought
affects our perception and we see things already classi-
fied, see books, and tables, and chairs, not merely
coloured surfaces, yet we can distinguish between simple
immediate perception and the process of thought which
begins when we ask, What is that ? i.e. when we begin
to make judgments.

The characteristic of thought, according to Kant, is
synthesis, or putting together, and all synthesis is the
work of the mind. When we egin to describe and
classify the contents of our perception, we pick out
separate qualities from the continuous whole we per-
ceive, and group them together. This grouping is, of
course, determined by the likenesses and differences which
we perceive everywhere, but we do not, in judging, con-
fine ourselves to noticing likeness and difference. For
any content of our perception has some point of re-
semblance, and some of difference with any other. We
are concerned with likenesses that go with or are the

52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

signs of other likenesses. On the basis of perceived
likeness we erect the notion of things and qualities of a
certain kind. In doing this we go beyond what we see,
and unite and arrange the contents of our perception
through concepts. That is what we are doing when we
say that is a so-and-so. For example, if I say that rock
is like a dog, I am simply expressing a likeness I per-
ceive. I do not imply that the rock is therefore alive
or will bark ; I am not going beyond how the rock
looks ; but if I say that object is a dog, I assert that all
that is implied in being a dog will hold of that object,
i.e. that it will have a certain appearance and behaviour,
which is known. I can anticipate, therefore, how it
will behave, look, and sound under certain circumstances.
All these phenomena, the appearance, the barking, and
running, though I may perceive them at different times
and places, are grouped together in the judgment,
" That is a dog." This is what Kant means by say-
ing, " Concepts depend on functions. By function I
mean the unity of the act of arranging different repre-
sentations under one common representation." Con-
cepts, therefore, always refer to perception, and it is by
means of concepts that we are enabled to introduce
such order into what we perceive, that we can anticipate
from what we perceive what we shall perceive. "Per-
ceptions without concepts are blind." Without concepts
what we perceive would not lead us in any way beyond
what is immediately given. " Thoughts without contents
are empty. ' ' Concepts are nothing, and have no meaning
apart from the contents of perception which they unify.
Most of these concepts are what is called empirical.
We get at them by observing likenesses and differences
in what we perceive, and observing which are significant

PRINCIPLES OF UNDERSTANDING 53

and important, and which are what we call accidental.
Science, in its discovery of laws, is only carrying further
this process which is implied in all simple judgments.
By observing likenesses and differences, their uniformi-
ties and variations, and discovering those which are a
key to the rest, we improve our concepts, and thereby
have more knowledge of what we call natural laws, and
can more and more anticipate experience. With these
empirical concepts and their development Kant is not
concerned. But there are certain concepts of which
Hume had observed that they are not obtained in the
ordinary way from an examination of the contents of
experience. The two with which he chiefly concerned
himself were substance and cause. These concepts
seem to play an especially important part in the ordering
and arranging of the concepts of experience. For the
work of science, in moving from a simple observation of
likenesses and differences to a knowledge of empirical
laws, depends upon certain assumptions or principles,
like the principle of causation or the principle of the
conservation of energy. These principles imply con-
cepts not derived, like the others, from generalisation
from experience ; they are the synthetic a priori
judgments which, as we have seen, constituted a special
problem for Kant.

Kant is first concerned to ask where these a priori
concepts come from, and how many of them there are.
This inquiry he calls the metaphysical deduction of the
categories. Having answered that question, he then
goes on to ask by what right we assume these principles
in our dealing with experience. This, the most im-
portant and difficult section of the Critique, he calls the
transcendental deduction of the categories.

54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

Most concepts, as we saw, are empirical. We take
certain likenesses and differences we observe as the
mark of a real unity in the things. The different natures
of different things we do not fully know, but we dis-
tinguish them by the different uniformities we observe,
and in order to explain our experience we assume the
unity underlying these perceived likenesses. Iron, dog,
fire, are names for the natures of things which we see
manifested in our experience. The concept, then, is got
from what we perceive, though it stands for something
more than we perceive. How, then, can there be any
concepts which are not got from the empirical differ-
ences of things we perceive ? Let us take such a concept
as substance, and see whether we can discover where
it comes from. Locke had been puzzled by discovering
that he could not, in any object, find anything which
was its substantiality. Calling anything a substance
is not like saying that it is hard, or green, or heavy ; we
are not concerned with specific differences in things,
but we are not therefore saying what is meaningless.
There is something, namely substance, which we can
distinguish from the hardness, or colour, or weight that
we perceive. That something we do not perceive ; we
assume it whenever we talk of a thing being hard, and
green, and heavy. A thing's substantiality is just the
unity of its perceivable qualities. But such a unity is
implied in the concept of any object. Substance, then,
is a name for one of the general principles implied in
our assuming that what we perceive are real objects.

Kant generalises the result of this inquiry into par-
ticular concepts of this kind. He holds that a priori
concepts or categories (i.e. the concepts which we do
not get from empirical differences of things) stand for

PRINCIPLES OF UNDERSTANDING 55

principles implied in thinking of things as objects or in
judging. If we want, therefore, to find out the number
of the categories, we must ask how many different kinds
of unity are implied in judgment, or what are the con-
ditions of judging anjT object. Kant does ot here help,
but rather misleads us in this inquiry. For he unfortu-
nately thought that the different kinds of judgment
could be discovered without further ado by taking the
list given in formal logic. He therefore first makes a
list of categories, based on the logical forms of judg-
ment, and then tries to show the connection between
these categories and the principles which were, as he
had discovered, assumed in the mathematical sciences.

The actual movement of his thought is, I think,
different. He asks if there are any general conditions
implied in all judgment. His answer is that all judg-
ments, all statements, that is, which claim to be true,
imply determination of time and space. From that
determination certain principles can be deduced. If
time and space are implied in all judging, then these
principles will equally be implied, and will hold of all
things which can be objects for us.

It will be easier to understand Kant's arguments if we
invert the order of the Critique and begin with examin-
ing the nature of the principles of the understanding or
of one of them.

The categories which are of importance in Kant's
argument are quantity, quality, substance, causation,
and reciprocity, and necessity, possibility, and actuality.
The last three are less important than the others, and
we shall not deal with them.

To the first five of these categories correspond the
following principles :

56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

(1) Quantity. " All phenomena are, with reference
to their perception, extensive quantities."

(2) Quality. " In all phenomena the real, which is
the object of a sensation, has intensive quantity, that is,
a degree."

The last three are classed under a general heading of
Analogies of Experience, whose principle is : " Ex-
perience is possible only through the representation of a
necessary connection of perceptions." They are

(3) The principle of the permanence of substance. " In
all changes of phenomena the substance is permanent,
and its quantum is neither increased nor diminished
in nature."

(4) Principle of the succession of time, according to the
Law of Causality. " All changes take place according to
the law of connection between cause and effect."

(5) Principle of co-existence, according to the law of
reciprocity or community. " All substances, so far as
they can be perceived as co-existent in space, are always
affecting each other reciprocally."

These principles, Kant points out, are assumed in the
sciences of applied mathematics. The application of
geometry to the world we experience assumes that all
phenomena are extensive quantities ; physics assumes
that quantitative expression can be given to the quali-
ties of objects other than their size, their weight, e.g.,
and all scientific determination of change assumes the
three principles which Kant calls analogies of experience :
the permanence or conservation of amount in changes,
the necessary connection of things in time, and the re-
ciprocal interdependence of things which exist at the
same time. These principles are not proved by science ;

PRINCIPLES OF UNDERSTANDING 57

their validity is assumed in all scientific investigation.
On what, then, does it rest ?

We shall follow Kant's argument more easily if we
take his account of one of these principles — the principle
of causation. For what is said of that will hold, with
necessary changes, of the others, and, as we have noticed,
it was Hume's criticism of causation which first led
Kant to formulate the critical problem. Hume had
pointed out that we had never such insight into causal
connection as to be able, from mere inspection of a
cause, to foretell the effect without any reference to
experience. He declared, on the contrary, that there
was no difference between observed succession and
causation so far as concerned the objects observed. In
each case we see first one thing and then another. The
difference, then, between mere succession and causal
connection can only be in us, in the way we come to
feel about certain successions we observe. In technical
language, the necessity of causation is subjective.

How does Kant answer this position ? He begins, as
is usual with him, by taking the problem a little further
back. Causation is a connection we predicate between
what we see at one time, and what we see at another.
Now if we take into account only the fact that we see
one thing at one time and another thing at another,
there is no difference between what we see when we
successively see two things which we judge to co-exist,
and when we see two things one of which we judge to
have succeeded the other in time. Hume, therefore,
proved too much. His argument would show that we
have no grounds for distinguishing between appre-
hension of succession and succession in apprehending,

58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

but such a distinction is the basis of our apprehension
and understanding of change or movement. If, then,
we examine how we distinguish between apprehension
of succession and succession in apprehending, we may
see on what the principle of causation is based.

An instance will help to make this point clear. Sup-
pose that I am sitting in a room, and look first at the
door and then turn round and look at the window.
There are two successive acts of apprehending ; the con-
tent of the first is the door, of the second, the window,
but the succession, I say, is in my apprehending. The
door and the window have co-existed all the time.
Suppose, again, that I look out of the window and see
a cab in front of the house opposite, come back into
the room, and then look out again and see the cab in
front of a house further down. Here, again, are two
successive acts of apprehending, the content of the first,
houses with cab in front of one house, of the second
houses with cab in front of another. This time I say
the houses have gone on co-existing, but the cab has
moved. The difference in what I see this time is due,
not to me, but to the cab. The succession is in the
thing apprehended. If we just think of the contents
apprehended, we have first A, then B, and say A and B
co-exist in the first instance, and have CD and CE, and
say D and E have been successive in the other. Why
in the second case do we not say when we look out of
the window the second time : Here is another row of
houses, which, though they look exactly the same as
the ones I saw last time, have got the cab in a different
place ? That is the kind of thing one does say in a
dream. Why would it be inadmissible in waking life ?

Let us first ask how we ever come to make the dis-

PRINCIPLES OF UNDERSTANDING 59

tinction between change in the content of our perception,
which is due to change in us, and change in the things we
perceive. Look out of a window into a busy street. As
we look certain things remain the same, the houses
opposite, the lamp-posts, and so on, but other things
change. The permanence of part of the contents
guarantees us that the change we perceive is not due to
us : if it were, these would change also. Therefore it
must be in certain of the things. Change is perceived
against a background that is permanent and does not
change. But any such particular perception is, of
course, very limited. We do not see all the world at
once, and we only come to know a larger extent of reality
by means of memory, which enables us to put together
what we see at one time with what we see at another.
We have got to try and understand how it is that we
make this distinction, which is clear to us in small
isolated bits of experience, hold of all experience. Now
if reality did not change, and we were conscious of our
own movements, we could go from one point to another
of reality and back again, and could be aware that the
changes in our perception were all due, not to change in
reality, but to us — were our history. We should know
that the different things we saw were co-existing all the
time, and we should, in describing them, try to describe
them, as in a map, as we should perceive them if we
saw them all at once. The succession would be sub-
jective, the co-existence objective. If we perceived
nothing but change, we should be incapable of dis-
tinguishing between our changes and the change outside
us, for all succession in our experiencing would be ex-
perience of what was successive, and there could be no
distinction between psychology and science. Our ex-

60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

perience of reality is not like either of these supposi-
tions, but like both of them combined. Some succes-
sion of our experiencing is experience of the co-existing,
some experience of succession.

Reality stretches out beyond us in space, some of it
changing and some of it permanent ; we cannot tell
simply from the difference in what we perceive whether
the difference comes from change in us or change in
the thing. We can tell that only on the assumption
that we are having fragmentary views of a whole that
is continuous. The only continuity we know is the
continuity of our own experience made possible by
memory, and we try to interpret that experience in
the light of the larger continuity of the world which our
experience breaks up. As we go from one place to
another, notice now this thing, now that, we can test
interpretations made on this assumption. Wrong in-
terpretations are those which make our experience
inconsistent. If we thought that what happened at one
time had no relation with what happened at another,
that anything might happen any time, our experience
and our own life would be the merest jumble. Our
experience attains consistency only as we learn more
and more to disentangle the differences in experience
which come from our changes, from the changes and
the variety which are part of the whole connected
system of reality, of which we see now one fragment,
then another. The distinction between succession in
our apprehending and apprehension of succession, which
is the basis of all experience of change, implies the
recognition of change as not arbitrary but part of
a connected system of reality. As Kant puts it in
his formulation of the principle of the analogies of

PRINCIPLES OF UNDERSTANDING 61

experience, ** Experience is only possible by means of
the representation of a necessary connection of per-
ceptions."

But if our perception of reality is fragmentary, how
can we think of reality as other than fragmentary, how
can we fill up the gaps ? Only by thinking of the whole
as a connected system in space and time. For it is the
nature of space and time that they can be thought of
independently of the specific nature of the things in
space and time, and that the space and time we per-
ceive in any one experience must be thought of as parts
of an all-embracing space and an all-embracing time.
We cannot follow the whole history of a change from
A to B, we can only say that, if our experience is to
have any consistency, we must think that the fact that
we first saw A and then saw B implies in this case that
the change from A to B is part of the continuous system
of change in time, that it is determined in time. But
to think of an event as determined in time is not to
think of it as determined by time, for time in itself could
not produce one thing more than another. It is to
think of it as determined by the nature of what pre-
cedes it in time. We therefore conclude that like causes
have like effects ; for, if anything could cause anything,
we should never know that change in what we observed
was due to change in us — in the position of our bodies,
e.g. — and the experience of objective change would be
impossible.

The principle does not tell us of itself what causes
what. That can only be discovered by empirical in-
vestigation. That is necessary because we do not. as
we seem to have assumed above, simply see one thing
becoming another. We see parts of all kinds of changes.

62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

Hence succession may be objective but not causal.
Science has, by observation and experiment, to dis-
entangle and isolate different changes, but it could not
do this without assuming the principle of causality.

Causation, then, and the other assumptions of the
physical sciences, are shown by Kant to be "grounds
of the possibility of experience." We cannot deny
them without denying elementary distinctions in our
experience, without which life would be a chaos, and
which are assumed and justified every moment. While
Kant thus demonstrates the validity of such principles,
he is also insistent on the limitations of their applica-
tion. They are principles which give consistency to
experience, but must not be applied save in reference
to what we experience. They apply, in his words, " only
to phenomena." The purport of this limitation can,
again, be most easily seen by examining the principle
of causality. By means of that principle we connect
one event with another, but the reality is not two
different but connected events, but a continuous pro-
cess. The continuous process escapes us, because our
perception of it is fragmentary and discontinuous.
Inasmuch as a judgment of causal connection asserts
that. the events we separately notice are connected, it
is true, but it is false if taken to imply that reality
consists of a series of discontinuous events or stages
which are yet connected. Such an assumption would
mean, in Kant's words, that causation is applied not
to phenomena (things as they appear to us), but to
things in themselves (things considered apart from the
manner in which they appear to us). If we realise its
falsehood, we can, he thinks, evade the contradictions
which he examines in the Dialectic.

CHAPTER V

THE ANTINOMIES AND CRITICISM OF THE PROOFS OF
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

So far we have been considering the positive side of
Kant's argument, his attempt to confirm the validity
of the principles of science. We must now notice the
negative side, his attempt to limit the application of
these principles, and his denial of the possibility of
knowledge in certain spheres.

We saw that Kant in his Prolegomena summed up
the argument of the three chief divisions of the Critique
as an answer to the questions : How is mathematics
possible ? How is pure science of nature possible ? and,
How is metaphysics possible ? He qualified the last
question by adding "as a natural disposition of the
mind." The argument of the Dialectic is that meta-
physics, in the sense of inquiry into objects which
transcend the bounds of experience, is not possible as
a science, but that metaphysical questions arise natu-
rally from the nature of human reason. They cannot
be answered. All we can do is to see why we cannot
answer them.

Kant thought of knowledge as a process of extending
the bounds of perception, of piecing together the frag-
mentary glimpses we get of the world, stretching them
out in spatial and temporal determinations that go

beyond what we have actually experienced, connecting

63 E

64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

and linking up the events which we perceive discon-
tinuously. As science extends, the range of our know-
ledge widens, but the process of extension never reaches
its completion. There are always more facts to be
discovered and explained. Science, therefore, can never
rest content with its achievements, but must always
demand that the investigation of conditions should be
pushed further back and on. Prom this sense of the
incompleteness of all actual knowledge, and of all there
is that might be but is not known, arises what Kant
calls an ideal of reason, a demand that, in all investi-
gation into the conditioned, we should go on till we
come to the totality of conditions. This ideal he holds
to be serviceable and necessary. It has, however, a
natural tendency to pass from an ideal to an idea, and
in so doing it gives rise to the contradictions with which
the Dialectic is concerned. If all our investigation is
governed by the thought that it must go on until it
reaches completion, we naturally speculate on the
fulfilment of that ideal, and try to form an idea of that
totality of conditions, of how we should think the world
if we knew it in its completeness. Herein we hypos-
tatize the ideal or make it an idea, and we fall into
contradiction ; for we cannot really know the whole
without knowing all its parts. If we give up the slow
and never-completed process of knowing one part after
another, and try to jump to the idea of the whole, we
reach quite contrary results, as we apply to the con-
ception of the whole one or other of two assumptions
implied in our investigation of the parts.

Kant sharply distinguishes between the principles of
the pure understanding and the ideas of reason. The
former are implied in all our knowledge, and the fact

THE ANTINOMIES 65

that experience is not chaotic confirms them at every
moment. The second are ideals which guide know-
ledge, but are never realised. He calls them ideas of
reason, because it is the special task of reason to lay
down rules for the proper and complete working of the
understanding. This task, he thinks, is exemplified in
the logical nature of the syllogism which brings into
unity the judgments of the understanding. As he used
the forms of judgment as a guiding thread to discover
a complete list of categories of the understanding, so
he uses the forms of syllogism to discover a complete
list of the ideas of reason. In both cases Kant's reference
to logical forms is far-fetched. Actually the list in the
Dialectic seems to be influenced by a number of con-
siderations not always consistent.

There are three main divisions of the Dialectic. (The
first Kant calls the paralogisms of rational psychology.)
All knowing and experience imply the unity of the
self which knows. In actual experience that unity is
qualified by the nature of what it unites, but we may
try to think of it apart from and independent of this.
This leads to an attempt to know the self by asking
what must be its nature if it has the unity implied in
knowing, and to argue that the soul is a substance and
simple, not affected by the changes in the matter which
it knows and therefore immortal.

The second division arises from the fact that in know-
ledge we are concerned with series — a series of addings
together and a series of divisions, as of parts of space
and time ; a series of things arising one from the other,
as in causation ; and a series of things in dependence
one upon the other. The ideas of reason come from
the thought of these series completed, and produce what

66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

Kant calls antinomies. For if we start with the thought
that what we are trying to apprehend must be a whole,
we get one series of results ; if with the thought that we
can only apprehend the whole by going from condition
to condition indefinitely, we get another. Kant dis-
tinguishes four antinomies, each with thesis and anti-
thesis. The thesis of the first is, " The world has a be-
ginning in time, and is limited also in regard to space " ;
the antithesis, " The world has no beginning and no
limits in space, but is infinite, in respect both to time
and space." The thesis of the second is, " Every com-
pound substance in the world consists of simple parts,
and nothing exists anywhere but the simple or what
is composed of it " ; the antithesis is the contrary of
this. The thesis of the third is, " Causality, according
to the laws of nature, is not the only causality from which
all the phenomena of the world can be deduced. In
order to account for these phenomena it is necessary
also to admit another causality, that of freedom " ;
the antithesis, " There is no freedom, but everything
in the world takes place entirely according to the laws
of nature." The thesis of the fourth is, " There exists
an absolutely necessary Being belonging to the world,
either as a part or as a cause of it " ; the antithesis
is a denial of this.

The problems of the third division of the Dialectic
arises from an attempt to think of a whole which shall
include both the known world and the mind that knows.
This attempt, which Kant calls the ideal of pure reason,
leads to proofs of the existence of God.

As the Dialectic proceeds, it becomes clear that Kant
has another fist to hand. He enumerates, as the three
great objects of metaphysical inquiry, Godj Freedom,

THE ANTINOMIES 67

and immortality, and in his discussion of the ideas of
reason he treats them principally as attempts to give
definite and dogmatic answers to the problems sug-
gested by these three topics.

Immortality is the subject of what Kant calls the
paralogisms of rational psychology. He argues that all
attempts to prove the immortality of the soul by a
priori arguments involve an argument of this kind :
they begin by noting that death is always dissolution
of some kind, that, therefore, what is not made up of
parts and cannot be dissolved, cannot die. Then they
urge that the soul is not made up of parts, and therefore
cannot die. The fallacy in this argument is that it
treats the unity of the self as though it were an object
of knowledge. We can show that knowledge is only
possible if the self has a unity other than that of a
spatial whole, but we cannot therefore argue that it
must be exactly like a spatial whole, in the sense that
death in it can only be brought about by dissolution,
but unlike a spatial whole in that in it there is nothing
to be dissolved. The real nature of the unity of the
self, Kant argues, cannot be known. All we can do
is to reject a priori arguments either for or against its
immortality.

Freedom is treated in the third antinomy of pure
reason, and to that Kant devotes most attention, but
others of the antinomies are concerned with the diffi-
culties arising from the application of spatial and tem-
poral determinations to reality as a whole, and to the
category of necessity. Kant makes a distinction be-
tween the first two and the second two antinomies. It
is the first two that express the inadequacy of temporal
or spatial determination to reality as a whole. All such

68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

determination implies measurement, and measurement
is always a relation of part to part. The antitheses of
both antinomies express the inadequacy of any number
to the expression of the nature of the whole, the thesis
the inadequacy of regarding reality as an aggregate or
addition of any kind. Each is strong in what it denies,
and Kant's solution is that both thesis and antithesis
are false, because you cannot apply spatial or temporal
determination to the world as a whole.

In contrast the solution of the other antinomies is that
both thesis and antithesis are true, and that is possible
because they are concerned with different things. The
third antinomy arises from the difficulty of applying
the category of causation to the world as a whole. The
assumption underlying the thesis is not, as is some-
times asserted, merely that the notion of infinity in
itself implies a contradiction, but that a determinate
result must have a determinate cause. If we think
of what actually exists now as having been caused by
what has preceded it, we must think of that which
has had a determinate result being itself determinate.
It is the familiar argument for a first cause. In causa-
tion we seem to be relating one event to another event,
and are really only putting the question of origination
further back. Yet, if we say that therefore we must
suppose an absolute origination of change, a beginning
of the series, we have to answer the question, How is it
possible to think of the originating number of the
series ? For to think that something can arise from
nothing is to contradict the principle of causation.

Kant's solution to this difficulty is important, for
it had great influence upon his ethical theory. The
category of causation applies only to phenomena. If

THE ANTINOMIES 69

we think of things as phenomena we must recognise
that they are subject to the principle of causation ;
if we think of them as things in themselves, the cate-
gory of causation does not apply to them, and their
action may be free. The same action may therefore
on its phenomenal side be determined, and on its
nominal side, as the action of a thing in itself, be free.
This may seem to be solving one contradiction by pro-
pounding another, till we remember that in causation
we do not explain the relation of cause to effect. The
relation we discover is between one instance of cause
and effect and another. Like causes have like effects.
The principle applies, then, in so far as things are like
one another. It applies to changes which are aggre-
gates or complexes of simpler changes which are like
other changes. If and in so far as there are things which
are more than aggregates of their elements, and are
therefore unique, there are things to whose changes
no laws of cause and effect are adequate. The point
may be illustrated by the way we think about character.
If we think of a man's character as his characteristics,
his being this or that kind of person, we must think of
his action as so far determined, but that does not
prevent us from thinking of his individuality as some-
thing more than any sum or combination of charac-
teristics, as something essentially alive, which escapes
all attempts to bind it by rules. It is the difference in
Kant's words between man regarded " from the point
of view of anthropology," and man regarded as a re-
sponsible moral being. We shall see in the next chapter
that this distinction is the basis of Kant's moral theory.
Here it must be noted that he does not claim that his
solution of the third antinomy proves the fact of free-

70 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

dom. That, he held, no merely intellectual argument
could prove. It only defends the possibility of freedom.
The third division of the Dialectic is an examination
of the proofs of the existence of God. When we study
Kant's account of them, we find we are concerned not,
as elsewhere in the Dialectic, with a conflict springing
from the nature of reason itself, but with the relation
of thought and conduct. Kant distinguishes three
proofs of the existence of God — the ontological, the
cosmological, and the physico-theological — but he main-
tains that the last two really rest upon and imply the
first. The first, the ontological proof, is the argument
that the very conception of a perfect being implies exist-
ence. It is the only proof of moral importance, inasmuch
as it attempts to argue a priori that a being of perfect
morality must exist. Kant's answer to it is that, to
argue that we could not conceive a perfect being unless
we conceived that being's existence, is to suppose that
to conceive of a thing, and to conceive of the same
thing existing, is to conceive of different things. Exist-
ence, he says, adds nothing to the concept of an object.
Kant's objection to the ontological proof has been
criticised. But the proof either assumes that God is
a being independent of and separate from the rest of
reality, and then, as Kant says, we may conceive God
as existing, but our conception not being necessitated,
carries no necessity with it. (If I conceive a hundred
dollars to be in my pocket, he says, I conceive them to
be there ; but that does not mean the dollars are there.)
Or if we say that reality must be thought of as existing,
the answer is, Yes, but must reality necessarily be
thought of as morally perfect ? It is this last assump-
tion which alone makes the ontological proof worth

THE ANTINOMIES 71

proving ; for arguments about the existence or non-
existence of God are mere quarrels about words, except
in so far as they are concerned with moral issues. But
moral issues cannot be solved by a consideration of
purely intellectual assumptions. The nature of the
other two proofs of God's existence makes this clear.
The second, the cosmological, is the argument that if
anything exists, something must necessarily exist.
Kant's answer is that this is sound so far as it goes,
but it does not prove that what necessarily exists is a
morally perfect being. The third, the physico-theological
argument, is the familiar argument from design. Kant
treats this argument with much greater respect than
the other two, but insists that we must see how far it
will carry us. If we are going to infer the nature of
God from the nature of the world as we see it, we must
do so honestly. But though we see design in the world,
we do not see perfection, and on the basis of this argu-
ment we cannot ignore the imperfection and want of
harmony which is as patent as the harmony and design.
Kant's analysis of these proofs seems negative. Its real
purport is to insist that religion cannot be dissociated
from moral experience, that the knowledge of God,
which is the concern of religion, is not got by intellectual
speculation, but in the moral life. When he said that
he had limited reason to make room for faith, he did
not mean that men could not prove the existence of
God, but might believe in it if they pleased. He meant
that God is implied and known above all in moral
action. His criticism of these classical proofs is thus
the beginning of that revivified philosophy of religion
whose chief representatives have been Schleiermacher
and Ritschl.

CHAPTER VI

rant's moral theory

Kant's moral theory is an integral part of his philo-
sophical system. If the Critique of Pure Reason argues
the impotence of reason in the sphere of speculation,
the Critique of Practical Reason affirms its sovereignty
in the sphere of practice. The second Critique is thus
the complement of the first. Kant's treatment of moral
problems being largely the consequence of the con-
clusions of the first Critique, his moral theory is thus
mainly metaphysical. The title of one of his works on
moral theory, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic
of Morals, bears this out. There were, no doubt, other
influences which had their effect on his conception of
morality. He tells us himself that he was inspired by
the teaching of Rousseau on the dignity and worth of
man. He was undoubtedly repelled into a reaction
against the sentimental school of Shaftesbury, which in
its German adherents insisted on the agreeable and gentle-
manly nature of virtue with an almost sickly sentiment.
This reaction accounts for the extreme emphasis laid
by Kant on the divorce between duty and any kind
of inclination. But his doctrine as a whole can only
be understood in the light of the conclusions of the first
Critique.

Kant's conception of freedom or autonomy of the will
is the key to his moral theory. " On the hypothesis of

72

HIS MORAL THEORY 73

freedom of the will," he says, " morality together with
its principle follows from it by mere analysis of the
conception." We saw in the last chapter that Kant
regarded human action, when looked at from an anthro-
pological point of view, as phenomenal, and therefore
subject to the law of cause and effect. If we think of
man as a creature of inclination, with likes and dis-
likes, we seem, in considering men's differences from
one another in this respect, to be dealing with matters
of fact over which men have no control. We are born
and grow up with different natures, with the result
that one man likes one thing, another another; one
man's temptations do not tempt another, what one
man finds easy another finds difficult. We seem here
to be in a world where causation rules. If men act
differently, it is because their external environment,
acting upon their different natures, calls out different
responses. So far, then, says Kant, as men act accord-
ing to inclination, do things because they like doing
them, or avoid them because they dislike them, their
actions are what he calls heteronomous, governed by
laws over which they have no control. We assume,
whenever we are trying to explain human actions, that
they are the result of the interaction of character and
environment, and are not to be praised or blamed but
understood. Tout comprendre est tout pardonner

But when we consider our moral judgments we seem
to be in a different world, for there are some actions
which we think we or others ought to have done or
ought not to have done, and this obligation has nothing
to do with our likes and dislikes. If we look back
upon a past action of our own. we may see why we
did it, understand how the temptation to it appealed

74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

with peculiar strength to something in our nature, yet
nevertheless we may say that we ought not to have
done it, and with that judgment goes the conviction
that we need not have done it. The conception of
" what ought to be " is on a different plane from the
conception of " what is," and assumes a different kind
of causality. It assumes that, when we are done with
our analysis of character, of a man's likes and dislikes
and the effect of circumstances upon them, we can still
assume that it is in his power to do what he ought and
to abstain from doing what he ought not. We praise
the first and blame the second, whether in ourselves or
others, just because we assume, over and above in-
clination and disinclination, a possibility of acting or
not acting as duty demands.

Thus Kant analyses the assumption of moral judg-
ment. But it is still no more than an assumption, and
he has to ask how it can be reconciled with the seemingly
contradictory principle of causation. The analysis of
the third antinomy in the first Critique, as we saw,
prepared the way by maintaining that the same action
might be phenomenally determined, and free as the
action of a thing in itself, were there another form of
causality — free causality or self-determination. For
the existence of such another form of causality the
first Critique offered no evidence. Kant's concern is to
show that morality assumes it ; for the claim of duty
is that a man should not act as a creature of inclination,
of likes and dislikes. Duty claims to cut across all such
empirical considerations. The motive to do what duty
demands must come from elsewhere. It may then
be found to be a claim that man should act not as a
part of the physical world, but as a moral being. For

HIS MORAL THEORY 75

man, as well as an observer and understander of other
men, is also a moral agent. As such he stands in quite
different relations to other men. He treats them and
himself as moral agents, responsible for their actions.
As a member of the world of moral relations he acknow-
ledges a system of rights and duties, he holds himself
responsible to other men as they are responsible to him,
and all this has nothing to do with what a man wants
or does not want to do, with how easy or how difficult
he may find it to perform what duty demands. In
this he is assuming in himself and other men a power
of determining the will in accordance with the moral
law. That, just because it takes no account of likes
and dislikes, cannot be derived from these or from
considerations of circumstances or environment. It
must be deducible from the nature of man as a moral
being. In obeying the moral law, then, man will be
obeying a law that comes from himself. His will will
be self-legislative. This power of acting in accordance
with a law that comes from the nature of man as a
rational, responsible being, and not as a member of the
world of causes and effects, is moral freedom ; it is the
assumption of all moral judgment and action. It
cannot, Kant holds, be explained. For all explanation
is the work of the understanding, and that can explain
only phenomena. It is enough that the first Critique
has shown that phenomenal causality is not inconsistent
with the possibility of another causality. In the moral
sphere we act and judge as if we were free. The moral
law and duty make claims upon us on the same assump-
tion. Moral freedom, then, is the ground of the possi-
bility of moral experience.

Kant's account of duty is determined by the sharp

76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

separation which he makes of man as moral agent and
man regarded " from the point of view of anthropology."
The commands of duty must be derived solely from
the nature of man as a moral agent. If they were
the consequence of man's empirical nature or his sur-
roundings, they would have no claim to override his
promptings of inclination or pleasure. He describes these
commands as categorical, and the principle of morality as
a categorical imperative. The meaning of this phrase
lies in its opposition to hypothetical. Many commands
and principles are, Kant says, hypothetical. They as-
sume that men desire certain ends, happiness or health
or success, and the actions they advise are advised as
means to such ends. The law of morality is quite
different from such prudential maxims. It does not
say, " If you want to be happy or to save your soul,
then act thus and thus." Its commands are absolute,
for they appeal to man simply as a rational being.
They must therefore be derived solely from a considera-
tion of man's rationality. It is difficult at first sight to
see how any commands can be deduced from a considera-
tion so abstract. How, we might say, can man's ration-
ality be known and recognised except in the content of
what he does and thinks ? •

Kant seeks to derive his imperative from the con-
trast between acting as a moral agent and following
inclination. Man regards himself as a moral agent,
morally responsible for his conduct, and he regards
others as morally responsible, whatever his or their
particular nature or character may be. That means
that he must act as he thinks any one else would
be bound to act, and from this Kant deduces his formu-
lation of the categorical imperative : " Act only accord-

HIS MORAL THEORY 77

ing to that maxim which you can at the same time will
to be a universal law." Another formula indicates
more clearly the relation of duty to a society of moral
agents responsible to one another : " Act so that you
treat humanity, in your person and in the person of every
one else, always as an end as well as a means, never merely
as a means." It is only by following such imperatives
that we can rise above the promptings of circumstance,
for only thus is the will self-legislative. In obeying
such an imperative our will is self-determined, for it is
following a principle that is derived from man's nature
as independent and transcendent of the world of pheno-
mena. Hence in moral action we are in contact with
the reality of things more truly than in any under-
standing of phenomena. The moral law has a dignity
which no natural inclinations or likings can have, and
the good-will, the will which follows such a law, has a
similar worth and dignity. " There is nothing in the
world — nay, even beyond the world — nothing con-
ceivable, which can be regarded as good without quali-
fication, saving alone a good will."

Such in outline is Kant's account of morality. A
discussion of some of the difficulties which a considera-
tion of it suggests may help to make its purport more
clear. Kant holds that the principles of right action
can be deduced directly from the imperative he has
formulated, and need take therefore no account of
historical circumstance. Now, it is easy to show that,
when we do an action which we know to be wrong, we
are making an exception in our own favour. We cannot
universalise the maxim of our own conduct. When we
do what we know to be wrong, we recognise what is
right. We say, " This is how any one ought to act in

78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

these circumstances, but I am not going to do it." We
must learn to look upon ourselves as we should look
upon and judge any other moral agent. If, when taxed
with wrongdoing, we reply, " I wanted to do it," or
" That is the kind of person I am," or " That is the
way I am made," we are abandoning the moral position,
and the answer is, " Whether you wanted it or not, you
ought not to have done it," or, " Well, you ought to
become different." But this does not help us when,
looking at actions from a moral standpoint, it is difficult
to say what ought to be done. Kant tries to show that
wrong action, if universalised, is always contradictory.
He takes the instance of telling a lie. If that were
universal no one would believe any one else, and there
would be no point in telling a he. Lying is essentially
parasitical. But this does not help us in the familiar
problem in casuistry, whether it is allowable to tell a
lie to save life. For here we have a conflict between
two maxims, both of which can be universalised. We
cannot regard such a situation as simply involving a
question of telling the truth or of saving life. We
must consider the circumstances of the case. This is
even more evident if we apply Kant's rule to the ques-
tion of whether celibacy is ever justified. If celibacy
were universal, there would soon be nobody to be celi-
bate, but it does not therefore follow that some people
under certain circumstances ought not to be celibate.
The question cannot be answered without reference to
circumstances. The moral of this is that the categorical
imperative does not enable us to act without individual
moral judgment in individual cases. Further, in one
of the instances which Kant gives he admits that there
are certain ways of action which might be universalised,

HIS MORAL THEORY 79

but which he nevertheless holds to be wrong. He
instances the duty of being industrious. A society
could quite well be imagined in which every one was
lazy, but he says. '' It cannot be willed." The ultimate
appeal here is to what the moral reason wills. That
means that we must admit that the moral reason or
moral judgment has a content not derivable simply
from the conception of the moral law ; that there are
certain kinds of life, certain kinds of action, which we
judge to be good, and others which we judge to be bad.
But, if this is so. we must give up the sharp separation
Kant makes between the moral law and nature, and
allow that things in nature can have a moral value.
It may still be true that they only have moral value
through their relation to a good will, and have no moral
significance apart from such a relation.

The difficulties created by Kant's sharp separation of
the moral and the phenomenal worlds are equally ap-
parent in his discussion of motives. He conceives the
individual as phenomenal, to be determined solely by
pleasure and pain. The power of the moral law is
manifest, therefore, when its commands run counter
to inclination, and the motive of respect for the moral
law conquers inclination. It is true to say that a man's
likes and dislikes in themselves are not to the point
when we are asking what he ought to do, but Kant some-
times speaks as though there could be no moral value
in an action which did not go against inclination. This
is perilously near that morbid theory of conscience
which assumes that the fact that an action would be
very disagreeable to the agent is itself proof that the
proposal to perform it is the voice of conscience. Here
again we have to say that the fact that inclinations

F

80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

viewed merely as inclinations have no moral value,
does not show that, relatively to the good will, one may
not be better than another. There is nothing to be
proud of in the fact that we dislike doing our duty.

This sharp separation between the world of morality
and science was somewhat tempered in Kant's third
Critique, which we shall examine in the next chapter.

CHAPTER VII

THE " CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT " — .ESTHETICS AND
TELEOLOGY

The Critique of Judgment is at once the most interesting
and the most difficult of Kant's three Critiques. It
seems to cover a much wider ground than either of the
two earlier Critiques. It concerns itself with the rela-
tion of empirical investigation to the a priori principles
of understanding discussed in the first Critique, with
an attempt to bridge the gulf between the world
of freedom and the world of nature as described in
the second Critique, with a discussion of the principles
of aesthetics and of the conflict between the rival
claims of the principles of mechanism and teleology,
a conflict which, since the discoveries of Darwin and the
increasing interest taken in biology, is becoming every
day more important. On all these points Kant has
much of importance to say. Modern theories of aesthetic
are mainly based on an acceptance of the distinctions
which he first laid down clearly. Much modern philo-
sophy of a type which is little in sympathy with the
doctrines of the first Critique — Pragmatism, for example
— is an elaboration of his account of the regulative
principles which guide empirical investigation, while
speculation on the rival methods of biology has hardly
advanced beyond the solution suggested by Kant.
Yet the very suggestiveness of this book makes it hard

81

82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

to understand. It is difficult to see the connection
which Kant supposed to exist between these very-
various problems. The form of the book, like the form
of the first Critique, is marked by subdivisions suggested
by formal logic, which seem to have little or no con-
nection with the subjects discussed under them, so that
the whole is a curious combination of formal system and
discursive content. Kant himself regarded this Critique
as the triumphant vindication of his whole system, in
that it brought together and reconciled subjects which
he had previously distinguished too sharply. Many
later writers have thought rather that in it the incon-
sistencies which they believe to exist in Kant's thought
come to a head.

We have not space here to vindicate the Critique of
Judgment as " the crowning phase of the critical philo-
sophy," as a recent writer has called it, or to examine
singly Kant's treatment of the various subjects of in-
terest with which it is concerned. It is important,
however, to follow the connection which Kant supposed
to exist between these different subjects. If we can
understand that, we shall gain considerable insight into
Kant's system as a whole.

Kant names the book the Critique of Judgment, or.
more exactly, the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment.
Judgment is distinguished from understanding, whose
principles are more peculiarly the subject of the first
Critique. The understanding, according to Kant, is the
faculty of rules. Judgment is shown in the application
of rules to individual instances. It is the element of
individuality and spontaneity in all thinking, for which
no rules can be discovered. Judgment cannot be
taught, different men possess it in different degrees ; it

THE "CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT" 83

is akin to genius. When, then, Kant turns to examine
the faculty of judgment, he is asking whether the mind,
in dealing with individuals in all their variety and dif-
ference, and in attempting to understand them, is guided
by any general rules or principles. The import of this
question becomes clear in his relation of it to the familiar
question of causation. The principle of causation, as
we have seen, is, according to Kant, an a priori principle
of the understanding, and is assumed in all experience ;
but it does not of itself enable us to determine in any
particular case what causes what. That is the task of
empirical investigation, and needs, as we know, the
imagination and insight of the individual investigator ;
in Kantian language, it is the work of the faculty of
judgment. Besides the a priori principle of causation,
therefore, we have an indefinite number of empirical
causal laws. Kant asks whether the scientist in in-
vestigating such laws, and more particularly in con-
sidering their relation to one another, is guided by any
principles. He finds that the scientist assumes that
this indefinite variety is capable of being reduced to
some kind of unity, assumes that there is continuity in
nature, that knowledge will not remain an aggregate
of disconnected rules. Chemistry, for example, has
discovered that the overwhelming variety of natural
changes can be reduced to the action and interaction
of a small number of elements. The chemist pro-
poses to go on and see whether the different elements
may not themselves be seen to be forms of one
substance.

These assumptions are, according to Kant, quite
different from the principles of the understanding. For
the latter are grounds of the possibility of experience.

84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

We cannot deny them without making experience
unmeaning. This cannot be said of the former. It
obviously cannot be essential to experience that the
multiplicity of the laws of nature should be reducible
to unity, for such unity has never been discovered.
Experience has been quite possible without it. This
distinction between two kinds of principles Kant ex-
presses by calling those with which we are now con-
cerned regulative. The purpose they serve is the regu-
lation and improvement of knowledge. They do not,
like the principles of the understanding, prescribe to
nature. We assume in them that nature is, in Kant's
words, purposive to the understanding — that is, we
first think out what order of nature would be intelli-
gible, and then look to see whether we cannot discover
in nature such an order. This assumption does not
prove that there is any such order, but in science we act
as if it were there to be found out.

This suggestion of Kant's has been elaborated in many
modern writers on philosophy, who have pointed out
how much scientific method is governed by the notion
of the most easily intelligible theory, and they have
argued that science assumes, for the convenience of
method, principles which it never completely proves.
These principles are called sometimes methodological
assumptions, sometimes postulates. The difference be-
tween such modern writers and Kant is that the former
think that all a priori principles are of this nature, and
that the principle of causation, for example, is itself
only a postulate.

The faculty of judgment, then, according to Kant,
assumes for regulative purposes that nature is purposive
to our understanding. What does this last phrase

THE « CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT " 85

mean ? We are often concerned to know the relation
of things to our purposes. It has been pointed out that
very many of our empirical concepts represent rather
our practical interest in things than our desire to under-
stand them as they are. Kant's phrase implies that,
apart from any such relation to particular purposes,
there is a more general purpose of mere intelligibility,
which some objects obviously serve more than others.

Here we pass to the consideration of art, for in our
judgments of beauty Kant holds that we similarly
disregard the relation of the beautiful object to any
particular purpose, and seem to be concerned with
general purposiveness. The judgment of beauty is, for
Kant, the supreme act of the faculty of judgment. It
is reflection on an individual for its own sake, without
attempting to fit it to our desires or see it as an instance
of our concepts or rules. Kant therefore proceeds to
examine our judgments of beauty, which show how
reflection on individual objects may display general
rules, and then proceeds, in the last part of the Critique,
to discuss the part played by the concept of purposive-
ness in our understanding of nature.

It would seem at first sight that Kant is not interested
in art for its own sake, but for the light which it throws
upon the nature of our intellectual faculties. Never-
theless he is careful to insist on the distinction between
artistic and scientific judgments. The judgment of
beauty, he insists, is free, is not determined by a con-
cept. We are not concerned, in such judgments, with
asking what an object is. In so far as, in our apprecia-
tion of beauty, we bring in such considerations we are
wrong. He therefore rules out any theory that beauty
is concerned with faithful representation. Beauty con-

86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

sists in the form of an object, and in nothing else. The
judgment of beauty, besides being free, is also disin-
terested. The relation of the beautiful object to our
purposes is irrelevant to its beauty. The judgment
of beauty cannot, therefore, be determined by rules of
any kind. It is always individual and immediate, and
the immediate feeling of beauty counts for more than
any rules or canons of taste. Kant therefore vindicates
art as independent of either science or morality. Yet,
once we realise its independence, the nature of art
throws light upon both science and morality ; for
the judgment of beauty, although free and not deter-
mined by concepts, claims universal validity. We
might put Kant's point in another way by saying
that art is significant, and yet is not significant
of anything in particular. Its meaning cannot be
reduced to scientific statement nor abstracted from its
form, and yet art has meaning. Kant finds the ex-
planation of the fact that the judgment of beauty is
free, and yet claims universal validity, in the suggestion
that a beautiful object is one the contemplation of
which arouses and enlivens the two faculties of the
intelligence, the imagination and the understanding, in
their proper proportion or harmony. All knowledge
needs imagination, the power of seeing resemblances
and differences in objects, and understanding which by
concepts gives unity and rules to the imagination. In
science the imagination is subordinate to the under-
standing, for the aim of science is definiteness and pre-
cision. In art the imagination is free, and yet art is
not the mere seeing of resemblances and differences ;
it also has its unity. It aims at the best proportion of
variety and unity. This is independent of the varying

THE "CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT " 87

natures of individual persons, and therefore the judg-
ment of beauty can claim to be universally valid.

Beautiful objects, then, are " purposive to the under-
standing," inasmuch as their form stimulates in the
most harmonious degree the two faculties of intelligence,
and in art we find proof that there is a principle of
general intelligibility, which may guide the work of the
scientist. The purpose of the scientist is quite different
from that of the artist, but if he is to reduce his facts to
order and intelligibility he must be guided by a prin-
ciple which is seen in its pure form in the artist.

In the second place, an understanding of the nature
of art has significance for moral theory, because the
judgment of beauty is disinterested, and shows that
pleasure may be independent of desire. In aesthetic
pleasure we are not merely determined by our inclina-
tions, for art is of all human activities free and creative.
We enjoy art not because it serves any of our individual
desires and purposes, it is enjoyed by something in
us that is universal. Art, then, contradicts the posi-
tion which Kant assumes in the second Critique, that
we cannot follow pleasure without being slaves of our
phenomenal nature. It is a disinterested enjoyment,
and is witness to the possibility of disinterested pleasure
in the good. Further, Kant held that in one kind of
aesthetic enjoyment, appreciation of the sublime, the
contrast between our weakness and the vast extent and
overwhelming powers of nature, calls forth in us a con-
viction accompanied by pleasure of the yet greater
might of the moral law within us. Art therefore may
become the symbol of morality, and the third Critique
does much to soften the rigour of the teaching of the
second.

88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

In the last part of the Critique of Judgment Kant
applies his doctrine of regulative principles to the
understanding of nature. The faculty of judgment, as
we saw, is concerned with the attempt to give unity
to the detail of the natural world. In this work it has
two regulative principles, mechanism and teleology.
Reality cannot be formed according to both these prin-
ciples ; for mechanism assumes that reality can be
regarded as a pattern or complex of recurring or inter-
changeable parts whose changes are necessitated, teleo-
logy that the world cannot be explained without sup-
posing purpose to be an operating agency in change.
Mechanism seeks to explain things as the necessary
result of their original condition, teleology in the light of
their highest development. The two principles have
therefore been held to be inconsistent. The scientist,
jealous for the validity of his discovery of mechanism,
combats the very notion of purposive agency. The
theologian thinks that to admit mechanism anywhere
is to give up his whole position.

Kant's solution of this antinomy is that both mecha-
nism and teleology are only regulative principles. They
tell us nothing of the ultimate nature of reality, except
that we can explain much of it by regarding it as if it
were a machine, and much by regarding it as if it were
the field of purposive agency. Reality must be con-
sistent with both these facts, but more we cannot say.
The moral is that we should continue to treat them as
regulative principles, and push each principle of ex-
planation as far as it will go.

Kant is here, as usual, the enemy alike of scientific
and of theological dogmatism. He will not allow any
limit to be set to the work of scientific investigation,

THE « CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT" 89

and yet vrill not allow a principle of scientific method
to be converted from an explanation- of perceived facts
into a theory of the universe.

Besides mediating between the conflicting claims of
mechanism and teleology, Kant also modifies the notion
of teleology. "When we think of reality as purposive,
we do not necessarily think of it as having a definite
purpose, as being subordinate, for example, to the well-
being of man. The principle of purposiveness arises
properly, he holds, from the contemplation of living
things, from the perception of the difference between
an organism and a machine. An organism is purposive
in the sense in which a work of art is. In applying the
principle we are trying to understand reality as though
the relation of all the different things in it were like
the relation of the parts of an organism or a picture.
But this principle, like the principle of mechanism, does
not carry us further than the facts we have examined, for
an organism or a work of art can only be understood by
study of the individual relations of all its parts. We can
never know the universe as an organism, for we can never
know all its parts. We can understand and put together
more and more of them, but we never come to the end.

The third Critique, then, enforces the lesson of the
first, that knowledge is the work of individual finite
minds, trying to understand elements in a whole that
transcends the limits of their experience, pushing back
the spatial and temporal limits which confine each
individual, but never removing them altogether. The
critical philosophy teaches the impossibility of absolute
knowledge, but it does so not by suggesting general
scepticism of all knowledge, but by enforcing the validity
of scientific knowledge within its own limits.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Translations

There are two accessible translations of the Critique
of Pure Reason — Meiklejohn (Bell & Co.) and Max
Miiller (Macmillan).

Kant's ethical writings have been translated by Abbott
(Longmans).

There is a translation of the Critique of Pure Reason
by Bernard (Macmillan), and of the first part of it, the
Critique of JEsthetic Judgment, by Meredith (Clarendon
Press). This last book has introductory essays and
notes.

The student beginning the study of Kant will find
Watson's Selections from Kant (MacLehose & Sons) useful
if he cannot read the Critiques in full.

Commentaries

The most useful small books on Kant are Adamson,
The Philosophy of Kant (Blackwood), and Watson, The
Philosophy of Kant Explained (MacLehose). The best
and most thorough work on Kant in English is Caird,
The Critical Philosophy of Kant, 2 vols. (MacLehose).

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